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CUSHIONED PEWS 





BOOKS BY BISHOP JOHNSON 


Confirmation Instructions 


Fifty cents a copy; four dollars a 
dozen. 


The Way of Life 


Paper, fifty cents a copy; cloth, 
seventy-five cents a copy. 
The Historical Develop- 
ment of the Church 


Thirty-five cents a copy; three 
dollars and fifty cents a dozen. 


The Personal Christ 


Fifty Cents a copy; four dollars 
a dozen. | 


WITNESS BOOKS 


6140 Cottage Grove Avenue 
CHICAGO, ILL. 


CUSHIONED PEWS 


Sig eee 


RT. REV. IRVING P. JOHNSON, D.D., 
Bishop of Colorado 


~ ~ and - - 


Editor of The Witness 


CHICAGO 
WITNESS PUBLISHING CO. 


1924 






FEB 22 2000 


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CVU0h VOMRONUVCS 8 Po07sS 


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Copyright, 1924, by 
WITNESS PUBLISHING COMPANY 


Printed in the United States of America 


FOREWORD 


LEAR thinking and the application of sound 
C; common sense principles to the practice of 

the Christian religion are the characteristics 
of the writings of the Bishop of Colorado in the 
editorial columns of The Witness for the past eight 
years. Shams, unrealities, conventionalities have 
been laid bare by his trenchant wit. His keen sense 
of humor and large hearted sympathy has lifted his 
message out of the sphere of caustic criticism and 
enabled him to challenge his readers to a life of 
reality and constructive practice in the building up 
of the Kingdom of God. 


These articles have been produced in the midst of 
the strenuous life that falls to the lot of a Bishop 
of the Church in the Middle West. Railroad trains 
and stations, with a suit case for a desk, have been 
the necessary Editorial sanctum in which most of 
them were born. 


For this reason they are all the more valuable 
and thought compelling. His observant eye sees 
clearly the foibles and weaknesses of ordinary human 
nature. His sharp pointed pen, dipped in the ink 
of good-nature and ready wit, outlines pictures of 
men and women as we really are. His faith in the 
love of God is unfailing. He sees clearly and be- 
eves wholly in God’s power to redeem humanity 
through the Church as we catch the vision of what 


the Church actually stands for in the lives of men. 
Bishop Johnson’s contribution in enabling men and 
women to see the vision and inspiring them to live it 
more earnestly has been outstanding and unique. 


This book is well worthy of a wide circulation 
amongst them as the expression of a real man’s 
religious faith and practice. 

JAMES WISE, 
Bishop of Kansas. 


Table of Contents 


RELIGION IN AMERICA 


MMBUIGHEI AL OWS Yt Gte atts ne ie eee oh 13 
ee I SULCS oe oe ie rei Nee a gaa Lae 19 
Dee CLiLes sant SLalAS MILES ee isin sce see ess 25 
Bee STI LNSCOUS Ws ee ree AAS ig cone «G0 La ee 31 
Pneebic-and: Little in. Religion... 0.80. 68.. o.% ol 
The Mean and Generous in Religion.......,... 41 
BUTE LOR OLE ET HOS is rs ftir th. spb ae lene ee ee 47 
ote Cereal SY ee 1 RCE faa A agra eke a 52 
pew GVOUSTICRS 7 OL SLAVING: (.5 ous cele oe bss abe 59 


THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 


PrmOrientali I NogICtMeNt .».. te. dee. so cele es eee 67 
RPP OCTANE COSDCL itt hen ask tk otal Sate 0 aE 71 
Bm IR TIE ee Aas hc cial dane a! Vietoioty & ole hv alelteren 78 
POINOLENCY FOte DEllISHNESS 9... od ea ee lb ocd eee 85 
MNRMNATE Ze TMMLE CUSTOM «oF op hs See chasatahy dew hee Wie vlc ee ah Oe 92 
PML CLA GEIYING Fo. 501,79 a8. Sie fa ot) eo Neeley earn ihes 97 
POSEN RO HUECH: is. sk cle ds Sk ee wk 103 
eI EACH Sere ee a, mth ie sce oe Fe ees 110 
nce ascuune IneTediont. «3... 550s ec bee ess 116 


RUT LAI ot 122 


THE CHURCH 


Your. Light: .).-. 0). cS See ee ee 131 
One ‘Thing Needful 0.2.2.0 oa 135 
Our Task 2. cochlea Goo ho ee ee 140 
Enthusiasm Without. Pletyo.! 2220s 145 
Parsons’ WiVeG8 eee oe er woe tes Se 150 
A'‘Gentléman’s Game. oy 24. ee eas ae ee 158 
Entangling -Alliances . So Ae ae ee 164 
A; Token: of: His Love. es cabs a ee 170 
Rudeness:- to: Christ..7o3 ne ou i oe 176 


THE CHRISTIAN YEAR 


The :AdventsGall ic 229) 5 Gr aoe ae oe ee 183 
Christmas Observance *). (7.5.4 site, 188 
Christmas “Peace: so. eho 2 ee 192 
An -<Epiphany Thought: 5.2. 2250, (ee eee 198 
Lenten. Training. 302). UA Sea eee 203 
A Lenten ‘Duty $:4). 2.\. 9) one eee ee 208 
Easter. Even’ .5 1. 9..c24 > 2 fly «ats ees Bae 214 
Waster, Fashions: 0/6. oak os ould Ban eee 220 


The Great Forty (Days:-<3:........°23 eee 225 


PART I 


RELIGION IN AMERICA 





Cushioned Pews 


E are always thanking God because of the 

WV sins we do not commit, whereas God is ever 

testing us for the things that we are try- 
ing to do. 

What the Church needs is those who serve, and 
what the Church gets is men who do not drink nor 
swear. 

Christ came among us as one who served, and we 
vo among men as those who have never disgraced 
ourselves. | 

Respectability is one thing and service is another, 
and the one cannot take the place of the other. 

A servant may be perfectly respectable and abso- 
lutely worthless to us, for we do not advertize for 
ornaments but for workers. 

For after all, character is a by-product of service, 
not to be sought directly but rather to be obtained 
indirectly. 

If you want to show your love for Christ, do some- 
thing in His name and your love will begin to have a 
reality. 

You are not serving a definition of God, but a 
Master of men, and He expects you to serve. 

The problem which confronts the Church is, “How 
can we transform a cushioned pew into a working 
bench?” | 

If we succeed we must reverse a great deal that 
has become custom in our comfortable parochial 
lounge rooms. 


13 


14 CUSHIONED PEWS 


In the first place the Church must not become a 
club with a recognized social status and the atmos- 
phere of material prosperity. 

The end does not justify the means, and an expen- 
sive program does not excuse us for adopting secular 
standards. 

I do not know who invented the cushioned pew 
and the parquet circle in our modern churches. 

When a man selects the best seats in the sanctuary 
because he can afford to pay for them, he forgets that 
God is not pleased that he should choose the higher 
seats. 

Let him, if he be a Christian, give the largest sub- 
scription and then, because it is hard for a rich man 
to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, take the lowest 
seat. 

He doesn’t go to God’s House for his own comfort 
but for sacrifice. 

Sacrifice is a hard thing for him to make. 

In this world he has the good things; then in God’s 
House let him choose the hard things. 

Why not? For it would seem to be what his Mas- 
ter would have done. 

At least that is what He indicated when He marked 
those who chose the higher seats. 


If a prosperous man desires to make his religion 
real let him give much and ask little. 

My experience is that our wealthy members have 
been in the habit of giving little comparatively and 
demanding much relatively, to their spiritual vision. 
That is why the Episcopal Church has such well-ap- 


CUSHIONED PEWS 15 


pointed parish churches and such poorly supported 
charitable institutions. 

Better have wicker chairs and well-equipped hos- 
pitals than cushioned pews and poorly supported 
institutions. 

In the next place let us appraise our service list. 

The early celebration of the Holy Communion is 
the most devotional service that we have and there- 
fore the poorest attended. It is in the quiet of the 
early morning; it has no mixed appeal. We go be- 
cause we would be with Christ; not to hear a 
preacher, nor a choir, nor to be seen of men. We go 
purely and solely to give ourselves, our souls and 
bodies to be a holy and living sacrifice to God which 
is our reasonable service. We go that we may dwell 
in Christ and He in us. 

The effort to go is a sacrifice; the effect of going is 
His blessing. 

The hour of eleven is the hour that is regarded as 
sacrosanct for worship on Sunday. 

It has become so by use. 

It is the time when we can get “those without” to 
come, so with a strange inconsistency we demand 
that it shall be used as a service for “those within.” 

Our missionary instinct is made secondary to our 
religious selfishness. 

We want a service that we will enjoy at that time 
so we have either Morning Prayer or a High Cele- 
bration. 

Neither of these services appeals to those without. 

The one is tedious; the other by its nature is for 
Christians only, 


16 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Of course, if we could have a time after the sermon 
when non-Christians could retire, the Eucharist 
might be profitably used. 

But no! If we do that, then Christians also join 
the procession and turn their backs on Christ’s 
promised presence there. 

Surely it is better taste for a guest to push back 
his chair and leave his host and guests in the middle 
ef the meal when he has had enough, than for a 
Christian to bolt from the Lord’s Supper. 

The intolerable rudeness of modern Christians to 
the living Christ can be excused only on the ground 
of their invincible ignorance of good manners. 

But the very fact that outsiders can be induced to 
come to church at eleven ought to make Christians 
keen to have a service which is adapted to the needs 
of those who are ignorant of the Church’s ways, and 
yet which reflects the rich devotion of our in- 
heritance. 

In some way the General Convention should pro- 
vide a service for eleven o’clock, other than Morning 
Prayer which is too long and complicated, and other 
than the Eucharist unless it can designate the place 
at which the unbaptized and excommunicate may 
retire. 

And in the third place, preaching has to undergo 
some sort of a major operation. 

I do not see how a young man, trained in an 
academic atmosphere, full of half-digested theories 
and without any real experience can preach the Gos- 
pel acceptably to those whose problems are in the 
kitchen and the shop. 


CUSHIONED PEWS 17 


Of course they could and would if they realized 
that they were to know Christ and Him crucified in 
their own spiritual combat, and then preach out of 
their own experience. 

But your young preacher is full of definitions of 
God, and opinions about social service, and ideas 
about religious education, and panaceas for reform- 
ing secular relations and theories of spiritual philos- 
ophy; so that the man on the street is neither inter- 
ested nor profited. 

For your tyro begins to preach where his theologi- 
cal education left off and is entirely oblivious of the 
fact that his congregation never has completed a the- 
ological training. And I do not see after he begins 
to preach, just when and how he is going to learn 
what to preach and how to do it. 

The world is hungry for the gospel of Christ but 
they are not interested in theological essays, even 
though the English be faultless and VE ethics com- 
mendable. 

The Christian faith needs a new emphasis in 
preaching and in practice. 

We need to learn that we are not above our Mas- 
ter; that He came not to be ministered unto but to 
minister; and that we go to church to forget self and 
to practice His presence. 

Money selfishness is mean but not any meaner 
than religious selfishness. 

The grace of Christ is like the sunlight which 
brings fertility to the field which has been properly 
prepared and therefore is in a receptive state. The 


18 CUSHIONED PEWS 


same sunlight will bake the very next field into hard 
unproductiveness. 

It is not enough to let the sunlight in—the ground 
must be broken up by penitence and irrigated by the 
waters of life, if the seed sown is to bring forth 
fruit. 

Let us stop fooling ourselves with our religious 
fancies. 

Unless we are willing to lift up our hearts unto 
the Lord we must not expect His grace to be sufficient 
for us. 

Church-going is not the end of Christian practice 
but the beginning of Christian service. 

We will really give thanks unto the Lord, when we 
carry into the House of God, the spirit which He de- 
sires. And that spirit is not ‘“‘What can I get out of 
this service?” but “What can I give to God through 
this service?” 

It is equally true of church-going as of everything 
else, that he who goes to save his life will lose it, 
while he who goes to gain his life will find the joy 
and peace which come from service rendered. 


Figs or Thistles 


UR Lord had the saving grace of humor, ‘Do 
@ men gather grapes of thorns and figs of this- 
tles?” is a very whimsical question. It is a 
- shame that so many stupid leaders have insisted that 
dullness is a sign of piety and that humor is an in- 
strument of Satan. Satan may be cynical and even 
witty but Satan has no real humor. The words that 
we have quoted have a context that it may be well 
for us to observe. 

They follow the warning that we are to beware 
of false prophets, and the intimation that we shall 
know these false religious leaders by their fruits. 

The two kinds of fruits which false teachers seem 
to produce are those which have the spikey qualities 
of the thorn and the rasping quality of the thistle. 

He unquestionably had the Pharisees and Sad- 
ducees in mind when he spoke of false leaders, for 
they were the popular leaders of his time, so popular 
that they finally succeeded in crucifying the man who 
exposed their falsity. 

In the same sermon on the Mount the Lord tells 
us of two kinds of righteousness ;—the wrong kind 
and the right kind ;—the wrong kind brings the fruit 
of falsehood, the right kind brings the fruit that He 
was so laborously endeavoring to produce. 

(1) “Except your righteousness shall exceed the 
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall 
in no case enter into the kingdom of Heaven.” 

(2) “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His 


bs ae 
. Re a 
Be ae ae i 
at at - g 


20 CUSHIONED PEWS 


righteousness: and all these things shall be added 
unto you.” 

It is perfectly legitimate to apply this test, which 
He asked us to apply, to the popular religious move- 
ments of today and to ask ourselves how much of our 
religious leadership is destined to produce thorns 
and thistles and is rather dubious about the value 
of grapes and figs. 


The first characteristic of these false prophets, 
then and now, lies in their tremendous popularity. 


They were backed by an innumerable company of 
little thorns and little thistles, which were never 
quite so happy as when they were pressing their ugly 
crown upon the Savior’s brow, or thrusting their 
spikey lances into His side. 


Neither God nor righteousness can be determined 
by a referendum and mere numbers do not justify 
& cause. 


The number of the names who followed the Master 
through it all were one hundred and twenty grapes 
and figs. The thorns and thistles were beyond count 
which same is characteristic of any badly cultivated 
field. 

Neither does the rasping assurance of thorns and 
thistles overweigh in God’s sight those who practice 
His righteousness in secret as they were bidden. 

“Tf you keep the outside of the platter clean by a 
certain abstinence from non-respectable sins you can 
fool the people into thinking that there is no unclean- 
ness inside. Popularity is no sign of virtue. 

The motive of Pharisaic righteousness is to justify 


FIGS OR THISTLES 21 


oneself and its concomitant quality is to despise 
others. 

The Pharisees and Sadducees could not endure 
contradiction, any more than the extreme partisans 
in the Church or out of it today can endure contra- 
diction or rebuke. 


Is is characteristic of both the high Pharisee and 
the broad Sadducee that they despise those who differ 
from them and bitterly resent those in authority who 
would curb their dogmatic utterances either for or 
against the tradition of their fathers. 


Whenever you find petulance or cynical anathemas 
you may be certain of that mind which St. Luke 
describes in the following language, “And as He said 
these things unto them the Scribes and Pharisees 
began to urge Him vehemently, and to provoke Him 
to speak of many things; laying wait for Him and 
seeking to catch something out of His mouth, that 
they might accuse Him.” 

These ancient Pharisees believed in making men 
righteous by legislative enactments; and the Sad- 
ducees sought the same end by daring speculative 
assertions. 

They were utterly oblivious to the graciousness of 
Christ and loudly invoked that righteousness which 
was by the law, or else tried to break down men’s 
faith by airing their own doubts and speculations. 

Both Pharisee and Sadducee were adepts in sub- 
stituting the laws or opinions of men for the law of 
God. 


They were like many of our sectarian ministers 


29 CUSHIONED PEWS 


today who loudly proclaim against the use of wine, 
while they deliberately remarry people against the 
expressed law of Christ. If this isn’t straining at 
gnats and swallowing camels, it is a piece of glaring 
inconsistency. | | 

It seems to have no weight with them that Christ 
said that he who marrieth her that is divorced com- 
mitteth adultery. 


Modern Pharisaism is like the ancient thorn in 
that it scolds those sinners who sin against the flesh, 
toward whom Christ was conspicuously kind and 
tender, and are indifferent to those who commit 
meanness under the protection of the law. 


Pharisees invoked prejudice against the sweet rea- 
sonableness of Christ, and today large religious 
bodies sanction a secret order which commits acts of 
intolerable meanness and cowardly cruelty in order, 
they say, that God may be justified. 

Whatever may be the marks of Christ, they are not 
the marks of the Pharisee or the Sadducee. He did 
not appeal to prejudice nor philosophy. He was kind 
toward those who differed from Him in their religi- 
ous views. | 

He frankly told the Samaritans that “they wor- 
shipped they knew not what,’ and then compli- 
mented them on their individual acts of merey and 
gratitude. 

He could see good in the inveterate enemies of His 
religion. 

He was compassionate toward those who were the 
victims of fleshly sins and rebuked the elder brother 


FIGS OR THISTLES 23 


who was a glaring instance of harsh _ intoler- 
ance. He was extremely severe to those of His own 
company who failed Him in their loyalty and com- 
prehension, but He could forgive those who crucified 
Him for they knew not what they did. 


American Christianity needs sorely to cultivate its 
grapes and figs and to get rid of its spikey qualities. 


Its greatest lack today is not theological compre- 
hension but wholesome fellowship which will attract 
the common people, even if it loses the wise and 
mighty. 

The Church was never advanced merely by its 
“wisdom after the flesh,’ nor by its “itching after 
the dollar,’ but solely by its ability to preach the 
whole gospel of Christ as it has received the same, 
with the compassion of Christ toward sinners and 
His accessibility to the fellowship of the ordinary 
man. 

Somehow the Church lacks flexibility in its invita- 
tion to those without. 


Some attribute this to the fact that common men : 
cannot accept this or that doctrine, but would come 
into the Church if the bars were let down in doctrinal 
requirements. 

Others think that the Church should come out more 
openly for law enforcement and civic interests. 

I do not think so. What is needed is to acquire 
more graciousness and less stiffness of manners; 
more fellowship and less of the exclusive caste; more 
human touch and less ecclesiastical manners; more 
kindliness and less self consciousness. 


24 CUSHIONED PEWS 


The most far reaching and permanent results are 
attained when men can combine a definiteness of re- 
ligious conviction with an attitude of cordial kindli- 
ness toward all men. 

It was characteristic of the Christ that He could 
tell the Samaritan: “You worship you know not 
what,” and yet win the Samaritan to His person. 

Christ did not water down his assertions to please 
the intellectuals of his day. Rather he allowed the 
intellectauals to pass Him by while He sought for 
those who needed Him. 

Because you say “I know” therefore your sin re- 
maineth but to those who said, “I sin,” He forgave 
the sinner and inspired him with a new purpose. 

The Church could afford to ignore the whole group 
of intellectuals, if it only could learn how to be so 
attractive to sinners that the common people would 
hear her gladly. 


Stalactites and Stalagmites 


GOOD deal that we read would seem to indi- 
A cate that the Church of the past was in some 

way inadequate for the people of the pres- 
ent, whereas, I cannot help feeling that the people 
of the present are somewhat inadequate for the treas- 
ure that they have inherited. Somehow, spending 
a million dollars on a prize fight intensifies that 
feeling. 

An organization which has produced such chil- 
dren of God as the Church has produced in every 
generation can still produce their like, if it can find 
the material out of which saints are developed. 

The difficulty today is that the age is not inter- 
ested in producing saints, but is concerned in solv- 
ing problems, whereas Jesus Christ was not disposed 
to solve problematical mysteries, but to make saints 
cut of all sorts of queer materials. 

The woman of the town was not a problem for 
Christ to solve by the aid of a clinic, an executive 
secretary and a checkbook; neither was she a social 
problem which He proposed to card index. The wo- 
man of the town was a sinner to whom He offered 
His own personal sympathy and help; if she ac- 
cepted His grace, she became a new creature; if she 
rejected His proffer to help, she died in her sins. 

Capital and labor were abstract questions which 
He left to academic philosophers, while He made 
His appeal to the rich young man who went away 
sorrowful, because he could not make the sacrifice 


25 


26 CUSHIONED PEWS 


which Christ suggested; and called the laboring man 
from his nets to follow Him. 

The work of the ministry is not, I fancy, essen- 
tially different since the disciple still is as his Mas- 
ter. 

The real sign of efficiency in the Christian pastor 
is still the personal note rather than the academic 
theory of how things ought to be done. Many otf 
our clergy may be men of quite ordinary talents, of 
rather ineffective methods and of somewhat ancient 
ideas, but their really Christian characteristic is 
that they persevere in holding up a very high ideal 
of worship and service to a very perverse generar 
tion. 

In some ways it is rather tragic to be a bishop in 
the United States. One sees so much from the 
vantage point of his high place. One is not im- 
pressed with the fact that vestries who are seeking 
pastors are so much concerned with spiritual qual- 
ities of human sympathy, personal holiness and de- 
vout habits as they are with the more mundane and 
more superficial characteristics of mixing, persone 
appearance and cultural manners. 

The Church is one of two things: It is either 
something sent down from above or else it is some- 
thing built up by human ingenuity. Of course, in 
a sense, it is both, but to use the simile of stalactites 
and stalagmites in a cave—the one is from above, 
the other built up from below, but the initiative is 
from above and the stalagmites are the result of 

drippings from the stalactites, never the reverse. 


STALACTITES AND STALAGMITES 27 


Now, as I see religion, the Church came before 
the sects and the sects are in a sense stalagmites. 
And they possess one great advantage over the 
Church. They are nearer the earth. Consequently, 
the sectarian leader has the advantage of being just 
a little higher than the cave dwellers. 

If you will note the leader of any sectarian body, 
he is standing for just the sort of thing that his peo- 
ple want. His leadership and their prejudices are 
-a unit. To follow him is easy, for he visualizes to 
them that which they would build. It is not so 
much, “‘Set me upon the Rock that is higher than I,” 
as it is, bring the Rock down to where I can step 
on it without much effort. | 

Whatever certain secularly minded ministers of 
this Church may say, the whole idea of the Church 
as embodied in her creeds, liturgies and formularies 
is that grace is from above and man may be lifted 
up by it, but he may not make of it a mere earthly 
process. 

One asks why so many of our ministers desire to 
take the supernatural out of the Church, and why 
they do not want to leave the Church in order to 
propound their theories? 


The answer is simple: They know the ephemeral 
character of mere human institutions. They know 
that stalagmites do not grow without stalactites to 
infuse them. So they desire the stable character of 
a divine institution which has been built up and pre- 
served by belief in the supernatural in order to give 
a solidarity to the ideas which would deprive the 


28 CUSHIONED PEWS 


gospel of all supernatural grace. In other words, 
they desire to use the labors of a long line of stal- 
actites in order to create stalagmites that they claim 
to be just as wonderful. But they are not. In a 
contest between the two for beauty, the stalagmite 
is hopelessly outclassed. 


It is important always to remember, on listening 
to their plausible theories, that such theories are and 
have always been unable to grow unless they depend 
upon a supernatural background for their existence. 


Truly, the law came by Moses and he may have 
learned a good deal of it from Egyptian sources, but 
erace came by Jesus Christ and no man has been 
able to furnish a substitute. 

This factor, however, has its effect in the Church. 

The man who rejects the supernatural has the ad- 
vantage of getting all his drippings from the stal- 
actites and yet remaining close to the earth. 


In other words, it is mighty easy for a priest of 
the Church who believes very little and yet looks 
like any other priest to get the close following of 
laymen who believe very little and are satisfied with 
appearances. : 


It is this factor which separates a good many of 
eur clergy from the close discipleship of the bulk of 
the laity. And in this the Church is unique. It 
also separated the laity from following our Lord. 


So long as He healed people and told them para- 
bles and fed them they followed him in large num- 
bers. When He began to say, “Except a man be 
born of water and of the spirit he cannot enter the 


STALACTITES AND STALAGMITES 29 


kingdom of heaven,” they asked, as did Nicodemus, 
“How can these things be?” 


So long as He gave them the loaves and fishes they 
flocked to Him, but when He said, “Except a man 
eat my flesh and drink my blood, he hath no life in 
him,” then many walked no more with Him and His 
discipleship dwindled from that time on. 


People are not prone to build up their Christian 
character by the industrious process of receiving His 
grace. They either want God to convert them by a 
sudden miracle, or else they want to build their own 
towers to heaven. 


I have known many of these priests who boast 
that they do not believe in the supernatural char- 
acter of grace. They are good companions in the 
easy reaches of life, in the drawing room, on the 
golf course, or anywhere on a nice summer day. 
They are fairly well up in solving the problems of 
life in the abstract, but are rather incapable of un- 
derstanding the mystery of poverty or the grace of 
speaking to the individual who is in trouble; they 
are rather dumb before the mysteries of sickness 
and death. 


To them, religion is a cultural rather than a re- 
generating process; sin is something which is bad 
form; death is a puzzle that had best be dealt with 
by euphemisms. 

It is not strange that prosperous people think of 
eternal life as merely a continuation of their present 
prosperity, but God forbid that heaven should be a 
confirmation of the cultural smugness which char. 


BOM CUSHIONED PEWS 


acterizes earthly prosperity and the tragic inequal- 
ities which is so characteristic of our industrial 
system. 

But the way out is not to rail at the system, but 
to regenerate the individuals who otherwise would 
ruin the best system which mind could create. 


Now, regeneration is something which comes 
from the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life, 
and it is our privilege as Christians to receive the 
grace that we perceive has come from the body of 
Christ in all ages. 

The only saving clause in the world as we may 
know it may be found by a close study of the parable 
of Dives and Lazarus, in which God steps in and 
fixes the compensation. 


Sects and Insects 


IME was when society was shaken to its 
foundations by religious controversy. Re- 
ligion was the one vital issue. The great 
parish church was the outstanding building in the 
community ; the rector was the parson, or the person, 
to whom the people turned for help and counsel; the 
service at the high altar was the great event of the 
week and the anathema of the Church was more 
dreaded by princes than was the revolt of the people. 
Unquestionably men abused the privileges of their 
high office, and prelates were not always distin- 
guished by humility or spirituality. 

Then arose certain men who disputed with these 
great men as to their credentials, and there was war 
in the Kingdom of God. 

The prophet rose up against the priest and the 
power of the Church was broken. 

The principle of strife and dissension replaced 
that of confident assertion. 

Great sects arose, which agreed neither with the 
Church, not with one another. 

Calvin and Luther and Zwingle put forth their 
confessions of faith, and the world rejoiced because 
the Church was no longer the dominant force that it 
had been. Not that the world fared any better. With 
all of its faults, the Church was a lenient landlord 
and she was ever kindly to the poor. 

Her leaders were but men, and when those men 
who were born to leadership, threw off the mantle of 


31 


o2 CUSHIONED PEWS 


religion, they became even less kindly and more 
brutal than they were before. 

Under the Georges, England was still ruled by 
men, irreligious men, and the sordid brutality of the 
times was unrelieved by pious princes or kindly 
priests. 

And after the Georges came the age of Saurian 
corporations and Simian aristocracy and _ sordid 
politicians. 

In truth, the world was still ruled by men and the 
absence of religious domination did not produce 
more kindly masters nor more contented masses. 

The sects went their way and soon fell into ae 
habits which they had dethroned. 


The post-reformation period did not produce kind- 
ly pastors or charitable courtesy. 

After all, whether the world leaders have been 
Christians, Turks, Atheists, Sectarians, or Politi- 
cians, they have all been men and have in their day, 
illustrated the principle that “man being in honor 
hath no understanding but is compared to the beasts 
that perish.” 

When we say that the Church was to blame or the 
state was to blame, or the sect was to blame, it isn’t 
so. We are merely assuming an alibi for the real 
culprit. Man is to blame — selfish, sinful, silly man, 
who ignores God and deceives himself. 

Whether he be priest, preacher, professor, politi- 
cian, or prince, he is prone to be a tyrant when he 
finds himself clothed with power. 

Having found the guilty man, let us see what has 


SECTS AND INSECTS 33 


happened. When the Church was a big thing it pro- 
duced big men. They may not always have been 
kindly men, but there were kindly men among the 
host that filled the churches. 

It would be hard to find a St. Francis today; it 
might be worth while to put up with an occasional 
pompous prelate if we only could produce the other 
thing as well., 

There have always been plenty of honest men and 
virtuous women and beautiful children in every age, 
thank God; but there haven’t always been big men 
and there haven’t always been great saints. These 
are worth as long a journey as to the Yellowstone to 
see. 

It is almost a truism to say that when the Church 
ceased to be big, the Christian world began to be 
little. é 

Each sect, being a fraction of the whole, attracted 
to leadership men who were proper fractions. 

For a sect is a segment of the whole, and the whole 
is greater than any of its parts. 

But the principle of subdivision went on indefi- 
nitely until the sects became smaller and smaller, 

and men’s vision grew pettier and pettier. 

The grace of God became confined to a small sec- 
tion of the civilized world, or the truth of God to a 
small segment of the whole truth; and the Church 
which had been hated, usually by wicked men, be- 
cause it was big and powerful, now came to be de- 
spised, often by decent men, because it was small 
and petty. 


34 CUSHIONED PEWS 


This process of devolution has continued until the 
spirit of the sect has become the spirit of the insect, 
and the world is filled with small folks, who buzz 
and bite and poison; they infuriate large mammals 
and destroy the charms of a peaceful valley. 

Formerly Church leaders went out valiantly to 
battle with lions. Now one hesitates to assume lead- 
eership in either Church or state because these bands 
of insects buzz around the head of the vulnerable 
hunter. 

And many a man will go out against large game 
who is powerless to protect himself against klans of 
insects. 

A big hunter told me once that he would like to 
visit the headwaters of the Amazon, but he couldn’t 
put up with the chiggers, for they had invalided him 
on a previous trip for several years. 

The situation reminds me of an anecdote of Sam 
Jgones: 

He had gone to hold a revival in a large Canadian 
city, but the revival lacked pep. He could not account 
for the failure of the thing to go until he discovered 
that certain local leaders had spread the information 
that Sam smoked, and because of this foible in his 
character, they refused to be charmed by his elo- 
quence. Whereupon, Sam told the following fable at 
the next revival meeting: 

“Once upon a time, as a traveler in the far west 
approached a certain village, he met several big 
bears carrying little children off to their dens. He 
was intensely excited, and when he arrived at the 


SECTS AND INSECTS 35 


village, was met by the fathers of the children, just 
returning from a squirrel hunt. Whereupon, he be- 
rated them roundly for their callous indifference to 
the loss of their children. Their reply was that they 
would like to go and kill the bears, but unfortunately 
the only weapons which they possessed were squirrel 
guns, so they must content themselves with shooting 
squirrels, while the bears continued their depreda- 
tions.” 

“These villagers,’ said Mr. Jones, “are like the 
leaders in this revival. You have nothing bigger than 
squirrel guns, so you go out to shoot my peccadiloes, 
while the children of the city are being carried off to 
dens of vice.” | 

The political and religious atmosphere today is 
full of swarms of petty people, whose sole claim to 
virtue consists in their ability to sting the man who 
is trying to accomplish something. 

It ought to be evident to the smallest mind that 
one cannot produce character in one’s self by de- 
stroying it in others. The consciousness of our own 
sins should cause us to be charitable toward the 
faults of others, and to be kind and helpful to sin- 
ners. 

When Christians forget to be kindly they cease to 
fulfill the law of Christ. 

But when people become petty they cease to be 
kindly. 

Malicious assertions about men who are trying to 
do big things is the order of the day, and it is based 
upon a failure to grasp the bigness of Christ’s gos- 


36 CUSHIONED PEWS 


pel, which was not so much concerned with the faults 
of the sinner as it was with the kindliness of the 
saint. 

The Pharisee who posed as a pious man was lack- 
ing in that very thing. The Christian world lacks it 
today. It lacks the grace of charity and it lacks it be- 
cause charity can be developed only in a large room 
and the Christian body is cut up into small compart- 
ments. 

The sect spirit makes for zeal and destroys charity. 

The mosquito is zealous, but most pestiferous. 


The Big and Little in Religion 


ELIGION is really a big thing, but when a 

R little mind is confronted with a big thing, it 

bites off only a small chunk of the whole, and 

that which was a big thing goes on its way, while the 
morsel becomes the big thing to the little mind. 

Religion has much to do with various things. It 
is infinite in its diversity. 

It has been the motive power for many things. It 
has promoted education, philanthropy, social service, 
lodges, cults, philosophies and other movements. 

It has concerned itself with prophecy, healing, 
spirit rapping, telepathy, and other wonders. In the 
hands of Mohammedans it has sanctified many 
wives and much slaughter, and in the hands of the 
Mormon many wives and much business sagacity. 

The man who is self-seeking can invoke religion 
to gratify his lust, slay his enemies, fill his pocket or 
cure his ills. 

The man who lives in an academic world can give 
a philosophic turn to his religion or a religious turn 
to his philosophy, and so discover a new religion. 

The man who does big business can invoke religion 
to protect his dividends and the man who works by 
the day can curse religion because it does not increase 
his wages. 

Religion is elemental. It is like air and fire and 
water. With these elements one can sail his craft 
into the harbor where he would be, and with the 


37 


38 CUSHIONED PEWS 


same elements he can destroy his ship and be engulfed 
in the very element by which he plies his trade. 

The man who is prosperous can use religion to | 
embalm his conscience and the man who is down on 
his luck can secure religious charms with which to 
dispel his misfortune. | | 

The man who is well can ignore religion so long 
as he has a good appetite, and the man who is ill can 
become religious to aid his digestion. 


Yet religion is the same potent, kindly force which 
Christ sanctified. It still has force to make us friends 
with God; to replace hatred for personal enemies 
with love for those who have despitefully used us; 
and to inspire sinners with a longing to be clean. 


Like fire, it has power to illuminate the under- 
standing; enkindle the affections; energize the will, 
and burn out the dross. 


Like fire, it may also derange the mind; consume 
love; scotch the will and burn up the most valuable ~ 
of our possessions. 


Like fire, it must be watched, confined, guided, 
directed, and it will warm men into friendliness and 
contentment; but like fire it may become a devastat- 
ing conflagration, destroying the valuables of life as 
well as its refuse. 

Religion has made men saints and hypocrites; has 
lit the fires of hospitality and the inquisition; has 
built up Jerusalem and devastated Smyrna. It has 
produced Christ and Judas; St. Francis and Torque- 
mada; Allenby and Kaiser Wilhelm. In other words, 
religion is a force which, like all other forces, man 


THE BIG AND LITTLE IN RELIGION 39 


may use for his development or for his destruction; 
for his redemption or for his judgment. 

The mother who has seen her child scorched by 
fire loves not the fire; but the cold, hungry, lonesome 
traveler loves a fire-place. 

After all, things ought never to be condemned be- 
cause of our own personal experience, but rather on 
the broader ground of their benevolent purpose. 

So a man should not condemn religion because he 
has been swindled by a hypocrite, but rather should 
praise religion because it has given a Christ to the 
world. 

It is only thus that we can find the way that 
leadeth to eternal life. 

The world is full of many ills and many blessings. 
You may dwell on its wrongs or its blessing and you 
yourself will become darkness or light to those who 
look to you for blessing and find in you what you 
have found in the world. 

Elemental things are realities, but they do not 
change their nature to suit our moods. 

God gives us a force in religion and we seem to 
think we can treat it merely as a sentiment. 

The average man dislikes to think and loves to feel. 

We want thrills, impressions, emotions, and so we 
frequent the movies, sing jazz songs, and give bizarre 
entertainments. 

Those who have the money to spend seek to find 
satisfaction in creating the impression that they are 
prosperous, while they are grumbling at the size of 
their bills and the lack of satisfaction that they get 
out of life. Prosperous people, therefore, grow blase, 


40 CUSHIONED PEWS 


stodgy, dull, because they foolishly think that joy 
can be purchased with money. . 

A little soul cannot be a big man because it has the 
temporary power of spending much money, nor can 
such a soul expect to experience big ee after the 
money has been spent. 

In the same way the bigness of religion is limited 
by the size of the soul that comes in contact with it. 

As we have intimated, it usually takes a bite, gets 
an impression and runs eagerly away with the mor- 
sel, thinking that it has captured the prize. 

Religion can make men big, but it also can make 
them petty; and when one has persuaded himself 
that “the sky is falling’? because he has been hit by 
a raindrop, he has helped to make religion ridiculous. 

Let us endeavor to study the dimensions of Christ 
and then bring our own life into comparison with 
those dimensions. 

We may fail to do much, but that which we 
attempt will be on a scale commensurate with the 
Gospel. It will at least make us humble instead of 
making us petty. There is a great difference. 


The Mean and Generous in Religion 


A eres is nothing more tragic in life than to 
have a mean little man in a place of big oppor- 
tunities. It is much better for all concerned 
to have a big wicked man in such a place. 

The spiritual interests of this country have suffered 
more from the meanness of Christians than from the 
wickedness of sinners. 

For a mean Christian not only fails to let his own 
light shine, but he so misrepresents Christ to those 
without that he alienates the sinner with a big heart 
from the household of faith. If Christians are like 
that he will have none of it. This tendency to mean- 
ness is, I am afraid, one of the temptations of re- 
ligious people. | 

They become attached to Christ because they want 
to save their own souls and this seems to beget in 
them a saving disposition. 

They want to save everything else besides their 
souls. 

These economical Christians remind me of the man 
who was so saving that he declined to give anything 
to the Church at all. He based his abstinence from 
giving on the ground that it did not cost the thief on 
the cross anything and he was assured of Paradise. 

“The difference between you and the thief on the 
cross,” said the indignant solicitor, ‘‘is that he was 
a dying thief and you are a living one.” 

The thief on the cross had nothing to give and the 
Lord accepted nothing. 


Al 


42 CUSHIONED PEWS 


The poor widow who gave her mite gave little in 
the aggregate but the Lord gave her unlimited credit 
in Heaven. The rich man clothed in purple and fine 
linen had much but he did with it as he chose and he 
woke up in absolute destitution. . 

Judas tried to use our Lord for business purposes 
and he finally went out and hanged himself, and 
there wasn’t much to hang when he did it. | 


As I was writing this on the train, I overheard a 
Mexican in overalls delivering his philosophy to the 
Newsboy. 

He said in his broken accent, which I will not at- 
tempt to repeat: 


“In my life I have sometimes been bad and I have 
sometimes been good, but the only way to live is to 
keep on trying to be good—it is the only way in 
which you can win out. 

“If a man wants to live to make money, he can 
make money, but he was born without any clothes 
and when he dies he takes no more with him than 
he had when he was born. He cannot win out unless 
he tries to do right.” 

Truly one hears wisdom from unexpected sources. 
It was only the other day on another train, that a 
young man who is a country school teacher said to 
me: “The mistake in our educational system in 
America is that a boy has a head, a hand and a heart, 
and the boy’s hearts gets too little attention.” 

I wish some of the professors in our great univer- 
sities could sit at this country boy’s feet; they would 
learn something that they hitherto have missed. 


THE MEAN AND GENEROUS IN RELIGION 43 


To train a man’s head and hand without training 
his heart is to train a mean man, in most instances. 

What is meanness? It would seem to have been 
derived etymologically from the word “me,” and to 
describe the spiritual conviction of those who gave a 
selfish interpretation to the first commandment 
which might be paraphrased to read: “I will not 
have any other God but me,” and in this sense they 
worship the Lord their God with all their heart and 
soul and mind, and because their God is a very little 
God, they come out of the game of life with a very 
little heart and a very little mind and a very little 
soul. 

For no man who worships himself can ever grow 
to be any bigger than himself. 

Now many a man who thinks he is a Christian is 
really ignoring Christ in this world with a vague sort 
of hope that Christ will reward him in the next. I 
am sure that Christ will reward him just as he de- 
serves. 

But all meanness is not money-meanness. That is 
perhaps the most evident and also the most sordid. 
A stingy Christian is such an evident hoax. 

If we are a petty person, then we will have mean 
opinions about God and our God will be as meanly 
opinionated as we are. 

It is a strange contradiction of terms but it is not 
_infrequent to find mean persons who will be prodigal 
in financing a mean religion. 

The difficulty in the average community is to find 
enough generous people to support a generous re- 
ligion. 


44 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Some narrow partisan will give money profusely 
to propagate a religion which justifies his own petti- 
ness and helps to belittle the big generous vision of 
the Lord Jesus. } 

That is one of the greatest troubles in America. 
Mean people have appropriated the gospel of Christ 
and are using it for the purpose of propagating a 
religion that might have been put forth by the Phari- 
sees themselves. 


And these evangelists of religious meanness are as 
bitter and intclerant of anyone who dares to differ 
with their petty principles as ever were the Phari- 
sees when Christ broke their Sabbath day by rub- 
bing wheat in his hands as he passed through a field 
of grain. 

There are those who feel that unless the Church 
is achieving numerical results we are wasting money 
in helping to finance it. In this particular religion . 
is like art. The success of the Church in any com- 
munity is directly in proportion to the proportion of 
people who abhor meanness, especially in themselves. 
This reduces the available material in some very 
prosperous communities to a very small ratio. 

There are plenty of petty reHgions in the field to 
satisfy the people of little vision. And if they can 
satisfy their own meanness why seek further? 

The Church has a difficult task, especially in the 
smaller towns and villages to compete with those re- 
ligions which are content to send men of small eali- 
ber to be prophets to little souls. These petty proph- 
ets frequently have great success where a true 


THE MEAN AND GENEROUS IN RELIGION 45 


prophet having a real message would receive a proph- 
et’s reward. 

Christ ever sought out generous souls and when 
He found them, He rejoiced greatly even if they were 
Samaritans or sinners. 

There must be generous natures for Christ to find 
satisfactory disciples. 

It is the epidemic of petty selfishness which is to 
be found today in high places which makes it so hard 
to secure a decent world. 

As one studies the leading figures in English and 
American politics and compares them with the states- 
men of the past, one is forced to admit that their 
personal morals are much better but their political 
visions are much smaller than their predecessors. 
One despairs of men who trim down every issue to 
its political assets. In my judgment, it was petty 
politicians who produced the war. 

When we put a pious two by four in a position of 
responsibility he is sure to break under the strain. 

The little man in a big place is always sure to have 
two reactions. He is tremendously impressed with 
his own importance and he is very uncomfortable 
if his assistants know more than he does. 

The Master had a great vision and there have been 
eras in which men have caught something of it, but 
as a rule men have been too little rather than too 
wicked to accept it. 

“That ye may be able to comprehend,” was the 
prayer of St. Paul, for if men are not able to compre- 
hend the dimensions of Christ, they will never strive 
to attain the measure of His stature. We live ina 


46 CUSHIONED PEWS 


society which is obsessed with the value of petty mor- 
als but is oblivious to the fact that Christ was a 
prophet of big dimensions. 

I am more than satisfied that the message of this 
Church is good enough for us—I am not sure that 
we are big enough for it. 

We prefer some little society in which the village 
barber can become an imperial potentate and the 
undertaker can be an exalted ruler. And we fancy 
that we are a democratic country and a Christian 
one. 

Not that anyone objects to these or any other re- 
spectable citizen amusing themselves with these titles 
of the past, but the horror is that they should seri- 
cusly regard it as a worthy substitute for the religion 
of Jesus Christ. 


The Lord of Flies 


T IS atmosphere that really makes the Church 

| or the home. It is this atmosphere which chil- 

dren breathe into their subconscious selves and 
and it comes out in their ultimate character. 

Now the sins of the home and the Church are not 
apt to be flagrant sins but rather an innumerable 
company of petty sins which poison the contentment 
that might otherwise abide there. 

We do not expect to find lions or tigers in the home 
but we are used to gnats and flies which can be very 
irritating, although not so immediately fatal as the 
larger beasts. 

It must have been someone with a saving sense of 
humor who called the devil Beelzebub, which means 
“Lord of flies.’ 

That is just the role he takes when he enters the 

home and you can hear the buzzing of his innumer- 
able satellites as father complains about the multi- 
tude of bills, and mother about the scarcity of com- 
forts, and brother about his inconvenient chores, and 
sister about her dilapitated clothes. 
_ Satan has entered in, contentment has gone out 
and the flies settle down industriously at their task 
of disturbing peace and defiling the white linen of 
righteousness. 

I know excellent parents who really love their chil- 
dren and want them to grow up to be good men and 
women who are serenely unconscious that flies are 
sources of fatal infection. 


47 


48 CUSHIONED PEWS 


To sit during one’s youth at meals where members 
of the community are discussed and neighbors crit- 
icized; to participate in the buzzing murmurs of 
various members of the family about various com- 
plaints; to nag and to be nagged at sundry and vari- — 
ous times is to grow up in an atmosphere of envy, 
malice and all uncharitableness. 

What is needed in such homes is to put on screens 
which will keep out noxious insects, or in other word 
to keep a watch on the door of the tongue. 

Moreover, it is a significant fact that will bear 
meditation, if one considers that those who criticize 
others most are not those who are the most virtuous 
themselves. 

People who do not lift their finger to help any one 
else will complain bitterly that they themselves are 
being neglected. 

How often have I been told by some injured soul 
that they have been in the parish for so many years 
and no one has called on them. And when I have 
said in reply, “That’s so, you have been in the parish 
a long time, how many newcomers have you called 
on?” they not only look surprised but injured. 

It is frequently the case that people who are quick 
to detect sin in others, are expert because they are so 
familiar with that same sin in themselves. 

There is a sign one sees occasionally, “Watch your 
step!’ when there is a pitfall to be avoided. 

I never did like mottoes but there is one that might 
be hung over the door of our homes, “Watch your 
tongue!’’ 

Another form of this disease which destroys con- 


THE LORD OF FLIES 49 


tentment is the habit that so many have of criticizing 
the Church as though it were something foreign to 
themselves in which they have no corporate respon- 
sibility. 

“The Church does this or doesn’t do that.” “They 
fail to do this or they fail to do that.” 

The impersonal pronoun of responsibility is the 
alibi of irresponsible folk. 

Doing little or nothing themselves they fault the 
failure of those who are at least trying to do some- 
thing. 

I have seldom heard those who were really work- 
ing hard for the Church, indulge in those accusa- 
tions. They love the Church too well to criticize. 

Nor is it those who are giving largely. It is the 
shirker and the evader who talk to create an alibi. 

After all it is the habit of murmuring which is 
self-intoxicating. 

It is like rheumatic pain. It shows an accumula- 
tion of spiritual infection somewhere in the system. — 
Better have an X-ray to locate the pus-pocket. 

What the critic needs is not painful words but self- 
examination and confession. 

The root of bitterness is not in the object of their 
_ criticism but in themselves. 

If they will purify their own spiritual system, they 
will be peace-makers and not disturbers of the peace. 

If they would say more prayers for their neighbors 
and themselves, they would use their tongues to bet- 
ter advantage than they do in their floods of 
criticism. 


50 CUSHIONED PEWS 


I do not know what Heaven is but I am sure it is 
not a large place where critics abound and where 
murmuring is tolerated. 

And especially it is not a place where the same 
individual is judge and prosecuting attorney. 

I am very sure of one thing, and that is—God 
never intended a man to judge his neighbor when his 
own interests are involved. 

If you are the plaintiff or the defendant you can- 
not also be the judge and render the verdict. 

But that is what murmurers claim. 

I have been injured or insulted. My neighbor is 
a sinner. 

I am the judge. The verdict is that they shall be 
banished from my presence henceforth. 

Silly! All you do is to deceive your self into think- 
ing that your ex parte judgment is a valid decision. 
It will be ruled out of court on the ground of preju- 
dice. 

It is true that there are many disagreeable people 


~ in the world. 


Just remember that you are one of them, and that 
is why you are to forgive others as you hope to be 
forgiven; and if you insist that those who owe you 
a few pence shall pay you to the last farthing, then 
don’t be surprised if your big debt to God is running 
into the millions. 

He has told us plainly that He will not forgive 
unless we do; that He will not bless us unless we 
bless others; that if we insist on complaining, we 
will have some real cause for complaint before we 
are through. 


THE LORD OF FLIES 51 


After all, we are either instruments of grace or 
else stumbling blocks. 

And we do not discharge our duty to God by com- 
plaining about His Church and we do not absolve 
ourselves from condemnation by being expert in our 
criticism of others. 

Murmur not but give praise, for so you will do 
vour share in witnessing Christ to men. 


The Two Per Cents 


ET us study the law of averages for a few min- 

L utes; it may help us to solve the problem of 

life. Let us suppose that there are one hun- 

dred million humans in the United States. That is a 

lot of people. But the Creator has always been prodi- 
gal of quantity. 

He has made so many planets that the mind of 
man cannot count them. What then is a mere planet 
to the Creator? It is no more than a nickel is to a 
millionaire. On one of these planets which we call 
the world, He has manufactured things of innumer- 
able kinds in such proportion that figures would 
cease to mean anything if they were counted. 

Among these countless things he has made men, 
and made them by the billion, of all colors, shapes 
and fashions. You and I are each one of these in- 
significant creatures, so insignificant that if you were 
to express the insignificance by a fraction, it would 

1 

500,000,000,000, 
say the least isn’t much to get excited over. 

You can dress up this numerator in silks or uni- 
forms, or you can clothe it in rags and it doesn’t 
materially affect the terms of the fraction. 

Perhaps the marvel is simply this—that there 
should be so many of these minute atoms and that I 
should be one of them. 

Viewed merely as things, the universe has about 


52 


look something like this which to 








THE TWO PER CENTS 53 


as much cohesion as the catalogue of a mail-order 
house. 

It is inconceivable that the mind which could cre- 
ate such an enormous quantity of multudinous things 
should have had no moral purpose in it all. 

This would be to imply that the Creator is a tal- 
ented lunatic which is also inconceivable. 

True it is, that there are certain of these innumer- 
able numerators who tell you with a profound pity 
for your invincible ignorance that they are searching 
for the purpose of it all, by finding the origin of: it 
all. 

Personally, I am exceedingly dumb, I admit it. I 
don’t see for the life of me, how we are going to 
answer the question, “What for?” by solving the 
question, “Where from?” 

Supposing that we all started from a monkey, a 
clam or a pumpikn seed; that doesn’t throw any light 
upon our destiny. 

Let us suppose that the Creator has an apprecia- 
tion for quality as well as for quantity. 

There are reasons for supposing that this has 
something to do with the problem. 

Let us take the simple art of making money. Nine- 
_ty-eight per cent of the wealth of this country, if it 
came to a show down, is controlled by about two per 
cent of the population. 

If that two per cent should die tomorrow and take 
their wealth with them to Heaven, or elsewhere, the 
United States would become an enormous poor farm. 

Something like that happened in Russia. All the 
wealth in Russia was either impounded or dispersed 


54 CUSHIONED PEWS 


by a little group of self-constituted financiers, and. 
people find that there is mighty little to eat. Of course 
the theory is the other way. Most theories are, but 
theorists are poor cooks as a rule. 


The ninety-eight per cent have an idea that if some- 
how they could sandbag the two percent, then the 
desert would blossom as the rose. Nothing like it. 


We could have another two per cent, a little less 
intelligent and far less bountiful than the present 
two per cent. 

That is a law of averages which is as accurate as 
the mortality tables of an insurance company. 


You can legislate away the tables, but you will for- 
feit your insurance when your family needs it. 


Moreover it is not an accident that the two per 
cent who control the money should be the same two 
per cent, roughly speaking, who set the pace in soci- 
ety; so-called because it isn’t very sociable. In the 
first place they have the money to pay the bills of 
social vanity, and in the second place they actually 
have what most of the 98 per cent want, and so they 
have the respect of desire. They are as much of an 
American nobility as money can make for that which 
is noble. Society is dull, not because it needs to be 
dull, but because people who are financially sharp are 
apt to be dull along other lines,— not individually of 
course, but the heavier the millionaire the more 
weight he carries. 


Now there is another two percent to consider. 


Possibly there are two million people in the United 
States who really think. 


THE TWO PER CENTS 55 


Civilization is that state of society in which each 
man does one thing and hires the rest done for him. 

This is as true of thinking as it is of shoe-making. 
As one person has well put it, the rest do not think, 
they merely think that they are thinking and some 
others refuse to think at all. 

Sheep do not think. Others think for them and 
pull the wool over their eyes, and it is just as well 
that they do, for otherwise the sheep would either 
lose both the wool and the eyes, or else go off and live 
in some isolated mountains, where nobody else could 
live or wanted to. 

As long as sheep herd in green pastures they re- 
quire shepherds, which same is much harder on the 
shepherd than on the sheep; for while the sheep live 
they have plenty to eat and grow fat, but the shep- 
herd is apt to grow crazy. 

Of course this isn’t complimentary to the human 
race and it irritates those who advocate the rights of 
man. I am not advocating it as a program; merely 
calling attention to it as the law of averages. 

Now do not think that these thinking shepherds 
get the wool. 

No! the wool goes to those who own the sheep. The 
shepherds get a salary as a rule. I was told the other 
day by a man whose knowledge of finance is pro- 
found, (mine is not—I have never had the chance to 
develop it) ; that most wealthy men owe their wealth 
to the intelligence of their subordinates. That is what 
he called them, not I. 

In other words the two two per cent classes do not 


56 CUSHIONED PEWS 


necessarily consist of the same persons. Then there 
is another two per cent of American humans who are 
virtuous. 


I do not mean those whose virtues require the lime- 
light. I mean those who practice virtue because they 
have to live with themselves and prefer to move in 
deeent society. 


Or perhaps better, those who love Jesus Christ, 
have a profound impression that He knows what is 
in man, and are desirous that He find nothing in them 
that He would refuse to associate with. 


This particular two per cent is handicapped by the 
fact that it is forbidden by the Master to advertize. 
This is a great handicap in our very commercialized 
civilization. 

Such a handicap that many people, who are other- 
wise virtuous, cannot resist proclaiming the fact and 
thereby subject their virtues to a hardening process. 

For virtue is very like one’s hands, easily calloused. 
A callous is tender only when touched; it is not ten- 
der to those who grasp it. Honorable perhaps but 
hard. | 

And so we might ramble on with our two per cents. 
There are these in art, music, baseball, pugilism, 
handling horses, playing politics, doing the work of 
the Church, practicing medicine or patriotism. About 
two per cent in each class. 

Now what has all this to do with God’s world? 

Much the same as it has to do with a college educa- — 
tion. Here too we have great quantities of young men 
who shine socially, athletically, lethargically, but the 


THE TWO PER CENTS 57 


college couldn’t justify its existence if it wasn’t for 
the two per cent who study. 


I am inclined to think that you will find God’s rea- 
son for the world, not in some antique protoplasm 
from which it starts, but rather in the two per cent 
(if that is the percentage) who seek God’s purpose 
and find it. Whether you care to belong to this par- 
ticular two per cent will depend upon your treasure, 
for where your treasure is, there will your heart be 
also. 

This two per cent Isaiah calls “‘the remnant” and 
the Master refers to it when he says “few there be 
that find it.” 

We are a quantitative people. We love to have the 
biggest Church, or theater, or population or bank 
deposits of any city in the world. That completes our 
happiness. 

But I fancy God isn’t interested in our bigness. 

It is not the bigness of the mountain but the purity 
of the gem which the mountain conceals that delights 
the Creator. 

Mere obesity isn’t a virtue. 

Mere quantity of things cannot make a mean man 

anything but a mean man. 

If you really want to change this fraction, don’t 
fuss much with the numerator. That will remain 
about as it is. 

Seek a smaller denominator and you will have a 
much larger fraction. 

Better be numbered with the qualitative few than 
with the quantitative multitude. 


58 CUSHIONED PEWS 


It is your denominator that really tells into how 
many parts the whole is divided. 

It is hopeless to change the numerator into a super- 
one. Better seek that division into parts which 
appeals to your imagination and then put yourself 
bravely on that foundation. 


The Joyousness of Living 


ISCIPLESHIP of our Lord is more an attitude 
1D of heart and mind than it is either a state of 
respectability or a record of achievement. 

We must take God’s own method of revealing Him- 
self to us if we would thoroughly test this. 

It is as though a man of great position and wealth 
wished to test the loyalty of his friends, and so, 
clothing himself in poverty and throwing around 
himself the cloak of seeming failure, he goes to his 
onetime friends for their help and comfort. 

In reality he is as prosperous as ever, but he 
seems to be insolvent that he may test all those 
professions of friendship which he has received in 
the high estate which he has attained, 

He even allows himself to become an object of 
ridicule and contempt and does many things which 
are not the way in which they are done in the best 
circles. 

He puts on the livery of poverty and walks in 
ways that seem eccentric and permits diverse humil- 
iations to be heaped upon him. 

Surely he separates those who love him from 
those who use him, and those who will suffer with 
him from those who merely would prosper with him. 


So Christ tested humanity down to the last man— 
He tried out the twelve who had been with Him 
when He was loved and admired of men because of 
His mighty works, and He permitted them to deny 


59 


60 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Him and to desert Him when He reached the bottom 
of His humiliation. 

He scaled His friends down to St. John and the 
Marys and then received back St. Peter with the 
words that must have revived sad memories—‘“Si- 
mon, lovest thou me?” 

I think it is fair to say that our Christian fellow- 
ship is more an attitude of the heart and mind than 
a matter of respectability and achievement. 

Neither the beggar at the rich man’s gate, nor the 
fallen woman in Simon’s doorway, nor she who gave 
the two farthings, nor he who was crucified beside 
Him could boast much of either respectability or 
achievement, but they were all forgiven much, be- 
cause they loved much. 

And the measure of their love was that none of 
these were ashamed of that love when others de- 
rided it. 

Love is something which will not bear statistical 
investigation and cannot be recorded in a parochial 
year book. 

It is not necessarily associated with culture, moc: 
als or orthodoxy. 

It is the attitude of heart and mind which causes 
a human soul to count all else but loss. 

It is a force that can constrain the outcast and 
the criminal to climb mountains of transfiguration 
reckless of privations. 

_ It is a force that is true to Christ when all others 
fall away and hangs on to the cross even when 
the power of God seemingly has failed. 


THE JOYOUSNESS OF LIVING 61 


It has been the most persistent, aggressive motive 
that has ever stimulated men to spread the gospel of 
human kindness. 

It is the one thing needful in our personal con- 
tact to make the religion of Christ an irresistible 
‘influence in society. 

His power wanes and waxes strong just in pre- 
portion as He can command that kind of love which 
is faithful in all things; which is more concerned 
that Christ may be glorified than it is that the indi- 
vidual himself may be praised of men. 

This quality which St. Paul calls the Love of 
Christ may be possessed by any one who will per- 
sistently seek it and, when once acquired, will admit 
the possessor into the very best society that graces 
the Courts of Heaven; will endow him with the only 
riches which are imperishable and will enthuse him 
with a joy that no man can deprive him of. 

It is a rare quality because few there be that seek 
it, and yet one has to glance at any one who has 
attained it to realize that he has found a treasure 
from which he would not and cannot be separated. 

It is apparent to all men who look at the faces 
of those who have attended material success that 
they do not know joy, for who would look for joy 
in the directors of a large corporation or in the fre- 
quenters of social conventions. 

Their faces betray the fact that they have not 
found what they sought; nay, rather that they have 
lost what as children they once possessed. 

Joy is not found as a rule in the homes of those 
who have amassed wealth even though they are sur- 


62 CUSHIONED PEWS 


rounded with every conceivable material comfort, 
but joy can be found by any pastor in the homes 
where Christ is much beloved, and it is a joy that 
no man taketh from them. 

Many people tell me that they get no joy in their 
religion when it is apparent that they have missed 
the source of joy. | 

If you will question them further you will find 
that Christ is not a living reality, a real person who 
can hear their prayers. 

But surely if the human voice can carry from 
New York to Chicago by radio, the Son of God has 
no difficulty in hearing our prayers. 

And if we are really seeking the Love of Christ 
we will not confuse prayer with teasing God for 
something. 

Permit me to suggest that at least three times a 
day you will use some such prayer as this: 


O Christ! I believe in Thee because Thou art so 
true! 

O Christ! I hope in Thee because Thou art so 
good! | | 

O Christ! I love Thee, because Thou art so kind! 


O Christ! Iam sorry that I have been unworthy 
of Thy love for me! 


Inject into your religion, that which Christ 
brought into the world—the possibility of personal 
converse between God and man. 

Make Christ’s presence in your life such a reality 
that when you are thinking a wrong thought or 


THE JOYOUSNESS OF LIVING 63 


harboring a mean sentiment, you are at once con- 
scious that He sees you. 

Make His presence so real that when you fall into 
sin and do that which grieves Him, you are as con- 
scious of our Lord’s pained look as was St. Peter 
beside the fire. 

Practice the presence of Christ at each Eucharist 
so that His promise to dwell in you may be the most 
real thing in your life that day. 

We all must be profoundly conscious of our un- 
worthiness the moment that the beauty of His holi- 
ness becomes the greatest reality in our lives. 

Then we find our joy in serving Him—in feeling 
that perhaps He may approve. 

Then we find our help in feeling that He is near 
to care, to understand, to help. 

Then we find the world, not a dreary thing end- 
ing in a cemetery but a wondrously beautiful thing 
ending in the fellowship of Jesus Christ. 

No morals, no orthodoxy, no culture, can take the 
place of our personal sense of the presence of Jesus 
Christ in our lives. 





PART II 


THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 


'‘ 


Pe 
Ave 


te A teed | eee 





An Oriental Indictment 


HANDI is a religious enthusiast who is the 
(; Savanarola of India. A graduate of Oxford, 

a lawyer who has amassed a large fortune, 
he lives most simply and devotes his life to resisting 
the encroachments of Western Industrialism upon 
the ancient culture of the Indes. 

In a lecture delivered recently, I heard the Dean 
of English Language at Bombay University state 
that Ghandi was originally very strongly pro-Eng- 
lish, but that recent events in European diplomacy 
and post-bellum politics had driven him to a strong 
opposition to the supremacy of Western culture in 
India. 

Ghandi is not a Christian, but is a great admirer 
of Christ. He believes that the Sermon on the Mount 
is the best compendium of moral truth and is calcu- 
lated to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest 
number; but he also believes that the Gospel of 
Christ has been made inoperative by the crass obsti- 
nacy of the Western mind. 

“Why,” asks Ghandi, “should we seek to become 
a product of the Western industrial program, when 
the European thinks of himself chiefly as a body 
(only incidentally as a soul); whereas the ancient 
Hindu of high caste thinks of himself as a soul tem- 
porarily inhabiting a body.” 

After all, isn’t this indictment of Anglo-Saxon 
civilization by this learned Hindu one which makes 
uS wince just because it is true? 


67 


68 CUSHIONED PEWS 


When one thinks of leaders in England and Amer- 
ica one does not think of them at all as men who 
have accommodated their lives to God’s will; but, 
quite the contrary, as men who are trying to accom- 
modate God’s will to their own plans. 

These plans seem big to those who execute them, 
—so big that their material bulk dwarfs a human 
soul. 

In this they differ from their Master, for He never 
had a plan so big that it shut Him off from the ap- 
peal of the least of these, His brethren. 

-Any man, the magnitude of whose business has 
made him indifferent to the cry of human need, may 
be a big brute; He is not a big man. 

He may be a well-groomed and well-fed brute, but 
he is the kind of whom Ghandi truthfully says 
is chiefly body and incidentally a soul. 

There has probably never been a more brutal sys- 
tem than that of Western industrialism in its effect 
on all of those involved. 

When a man leaves out of his daily life those 
touches of recollection by which he shows himself to 
be a child of God, he certainly lacks something which 
would take him out of the brute class. : 

Unless one keeps up his morning and evening de- 
votions; his grace at meals; his hour of meditation 
in private as well as his hour of worship in public 
as the regular habit of his weekly life; there is noth- 
ing in his life to relate him to God. 

He becomes chiefly a body to be clothed and kept 
and his soul becomes so incidental as to become a 
negligible factor in his life. 


AN ORIENTAL INDICTMENT 69 


The fact that pagans are well dressed and well 
mannered cannot excuse them from the indictment 
of this cultivated Hindu as he flays our Western in- 
dustrialism for its lack of spirituality and for its 
ultra care of material interests. 


It is certainly a narrow way which one has to 
pursue in seeking spiritual culture, but no man is 
excused from the attempt by the difficulty of the 
quest. 

On the one side is the cant of the double-faced 
hypocrite, who talks piously and acts maliciously. 


On the other side is the mechanical goose-step of 
a perfunctory ecclesiastical regimentation. In 
neither of these perversions of Christian culture do 
we find those qualities of earnest reverence, of cour- 
- teous charity and of courageous self-discipline which 
should characterize the followers of Jesus Christ. 


That the representative of Western culture so 
often leaves the exploitation of religion to those who 
pervert it is no credit to his courage, to his culture 
or to his character. 


There is no question but that God expects man to - 
cultivate the soul, irrespective of those who pretend 
and those who fail, and it is no alibi for relegating 
one’s spiritual development to the background, that 
one is ashamed of his fellow-men. 

There is a demand today for men who put the 
soul and its possibilities before the body and its 
easier victories, and except it be possible to secure 
such men then the time will come that America will 
be like Sodom and Gomorrha. 


70 CUSHIONED PEWS 


The man who neglects God and refuses to. culti- 
vate his spiritual nature is confessing to the world 
that he is chiefly a body and only incidentally a soul. 

And such men can never aid in the solution of the 
moral and spiritual problems that face our civiliza- 
tion. 


‘A Social Gospel 


HE WORD “social” and ‘the word “society”’ 
have the same parentage; they are both de- 
rived from the Latin word socius, which 
means a companion. Yet the two words are just 
like two branches of the same family —the one 
branch seeking virtue and the other branch seeking 
prosperity. 

They are like the two ladies who were said to have 
lived upon the same square, but not in the same 
circle with one another. 

Christ preached a social gospel and by this is 
meant that He came to found a household of faith 
in which rich and poor meet together and acknowl- 
edge one Father; in which there is no respect of 
persons but master and servant meet at a common 
table and profess a common brotherhood; in which 
the learned are not arrogant and the ignorant are 
not bitter; in which the opulent are not vain and the 
poor are not envious; in which the cultivated are 
extremely courteous to the masses and the common- 
folk are gladly respectful to those in authority. 

No one can read the Gospel of Christ, or the words 
of St. Paul, or the history of the early Church with- 
out realizing that the strength of the Gospel was the 
sincerity of the fellowship between all sorts of folks; 
just as it was in the trenches during the war. 

But the “Social Gospel” has a brother which re- 
sembles him in many ways, but yet is most unlike 
him in other respects. 


(ae 


72 CUSHIONED PEWS 


So much do the two look alike that many people 
cannot tell them apart and yet they are very dif- 
ferent at heart. 

This brother we may call the ‘Society Gospel.” 
He too starts in the fellowship of Christ and seem- 
ingly carries out the will of the Master with equal 
earnestness, but he is really a rather unholy fellow. 

He accepts the fellowship of the Gospel with cer- 
tain reservations. 

Instead of saying, “Father, what wilt Thou have 
me to do?” and then setting out to do it at any cost; 
the Society Gospel hedges and says, “Father, what 
wilt Thou do for me?” 

Instead of saying, ‘““What can I do for the least of 
these my brethren in order that they who have never 
had much, may have something that I can give 
them?” the Society Gospel says, ““What can I do for 
those who are beneath me without identifying my- 
self too closely with them?” 

Instead of saying “What can I give up in a 
worldly way that I may be an influence for good in 
spiritual things?” the Society Gospel says, “How 
can I do some spiritual work without affecting my 
social standing?” 

I have watched the game for many years both 
from the standpoint of the poor missionary and from 
the seats of the mighty, and I have come to the con- 
clusion that it is much easier to convert people to an 
option on the Kingdom of Heaven than it is to get 
them to invest in the fellowship of the humble. Not 
that this high mightiness manifests itself in the 
crude and rather stupid way that one sees depicted 


A SOCIAL GOSPEL | 73 


in the movies, but in a far more subtle and genteel 
way so that it can deceive even the very elect. 

One doesn’t find Christians with that haughty 
arrogance which is so offensive to God and man; 
but rather with a cultivated aloofness which charms 
you with its gracious manner, while it freezes you 
with its distant frigidity. 

It is Christian in that it is willing to give light, 
but pagan in its inability to provide heat. 

Its love is platonic and is far more interested in 
some theory of universal brotherhood than it is in 
the practice of a more localized humanity. 

It believes thoroughly in a community chest as the 
least bothersome way of feeding Lazarus. It is not 
indifferent to Lazarus’ sores but rather calloused as 
to his blood relationship. 

When the Christian religion began, it sprang from 
the soil; not from palaces or academies. Its first 
protagonists were peasants; its early adherents were 
mostly poor people. There were not many rich, not 
many powerful in those early days. 

Until Constantine gave it imperial sanction, it 
was singularly free from social climbers. Then the 
constituency rapidly changed and the Church be- 
came the home of academic learning and _ social 
culture. 

The humble drifted into sects where they ceased 
to be meek; or the meek endured a situation in which 
they were forced to be humble. 

Certainly one does not wish to exclude learning 
' and culture from the courts of the Lord’s House, 
but one can pay too big a price for these embellish- 


74 | CUSHIONED PEWS 


ments, for there are more basic virtues which they 
must not replace but adorn. 

There is nothing more delightful than men who 
are learned gentlemen and also humble Christians, 
but the Church has suffered from those who have 
felt that it was enough to be the one without con- 
cerning themselves much as to whether they were 
attempting to be the other. 

One can never quite get away from those verses 
in the song of the Blessed Virgin, when she exult- 
ingly sings of the time when God shall exalt the 
humble and the meek and send the haughty empty 
away. 

The words have to me a very real meaning and |! 
rather fancy that Europe would be a joyous place 
today, if prelates and princes had spent more time 
cn the significance of these words and less on 
the pomps and vanities of their respective official 
positions. 

Arrogance in Christians of high estate has made 
envy, malice and all uncharitableness among the 
rank and file. | 

But we are not so much concerned with the pomp 
of popes as we are with the dispositions of bishops, 
priests and deacons; and less with the pride of kings 
than with the self-conceit of wardens and vestrymen. 

They just don’t seem to learn how to become the 
friend of publicans and sinners as the Master was 
and would have us be; nor do they seem to take in 
the tremendous spiritual importance of the prayers 
of the poor. 

I know that it is as difficult a task for the cul- 


A SOCIAL GOSPEL 75 


tured and prosperous to be humanly considerate of 
the uncouth and improvident, as it is for the uncouth 
to learn manners and the improvident to learn thrift. 

It is well for us to recollect that this is a world in 
which a shepherd boy became the great King of 
Israel, and a ploughboy the great poet of Scotland, 
and a rail-splitter the great President of our Repub- 
lic, and a carpenter the King of Kings and Lord of 
Lords. 

It would seem, not only un-Christian but also un- 
intelligent, not to appreciate the latent value of the 
common people, and to realize that the world owes 
more to cots and cabins than it does to mansions and - 
palaces. 

“The Cotter’s Saturday Night” is a truer exposi- 
tion of the dignity of human life than is the “Soul 
of a Bishop” from one who never was a Bishop and 
has somewhat of an indefinite soul. It is this one 
touch that is lacking both in our ministry and in 
our laity—we have permitted ourselves to be arti- 
ficially removed from the tang of the moor which 
produces the delicate odor of violets and hether and 
are too prone to revel in the rather sickening odor 
of hot-house neurotics. 

The Church of England lacked this saving gra- 
ciousness toward the lowly when it forced the Wes- 
leyans out of its Communion and caused them to 
lose the one thing which the members of the Mother 
Church lacked, viz.— humility and meekness. 

For humility is not identical with poverty nor is 
meekness lacking among the prosperous. 

In fact, a cross section of human society would 


76 CUSHIONED PEWS 


show that humility and meekness are not necessarily 
related to worldly prosperity or the lack of it. 

~The pity of it is that the Church has never seemed 
to appreciate these qualities in her own constituency. — 

Possibly it is the hardest lesson which Churchmen 
have to learn that the Church of the Nazarene does 
not fulfill its function by providing its members 
with a pleasant atmosphere of learning and culture. 

Learning and culture are rather a by-product of 
Christian influence than its basic output. An arro- 
gant bishop, a smug rector, a worldly vestryman are 
offensive to the ethics of Cnhrist’s Gospel, however 

acceptable they may be to a little coterie of con- 
stituents who applaud them. 

The test is not one, however, of external manners 
but of an internal attitude, a basic disposition. Per- 
haps the test which a Christian man ought constant- 
ly to apply to himself are these: 

Do I really worship God or do I try to refashion 
Him to suit my temporal condition? 

Is my attitude toward the least of these my es) 
ren that of the Christ or of the Pharisees? 

Am I more impressed with my own sense of recti- 
tude or my consciousness that I am an unprofitable 
servant? 

Do I consciously act differently toward those 
whom I regard as my equals and those whom I 
regard as social outcasts? 

Am I satisfied to move in a little clique of attractive 
people or do I really want to know and help those 
who are unattractive? 

In other words, am I a follower of Dives or of 


A SOCIAL GOSPEL fils 


Christ? Is my concern more that of purple and fine 
linen, of sumptuous fare and congenial friends than 
of the sores of Lazarus, his loneliness and his un- 
attractiveness? 

As Vice-President Marshall has very happily put 
it in analyzing our modern charity: “I am not op- 
posed to scientific charity, but I do not favor the 
introduction of science to the exclusion of the per- 
sonal and heart approach.” 

And so I might say that I am not opposed to a 
highly educated and cultivated Christian conscious- 
ness unless it fails to carry the human touch of Jesus 
Christ into the personal contact of Christians with 
publicans and sinners. Any other kind of Christian 
fellowship is Christianity with Christ left out. 

Of course the reason why so few of us are of the 
kind whom the common people gladly hear is just 
because it is the hardest job that confronts us. 

It is not easy deliberately to forsake that which 
is congenial in order that we may do that which 
Christ expects of us,for, after all, the Christian life 
is a difficult task for, as we have said before, it 
consists essentially in doing that which we do not 
~ want to do and it is loving the person whom we do 
not like. 


Orientation 


HE word is derived from the fact that the Sun 
lies in the East and we look toward the rising 
Sun as the beginning of the day. The Sun- 
worshipper faced the rising sun as his first act of 
worship. Sunday is a word of pagan origin and 
testifies to this ancient devotion to the Sun. In life 
we may be said to orientate ourselves, when we de- 
termine the prime factor to which we credit the 
crigin of our life. To what do we look for inspira- 
tion? 

So Christ is the Sun of Righteousness to the Chris- 
tian and we strive to orientate our life to Christ, as 
we “with open face beholding as in a glass the glory 
of the Lord, are changed into the same image from 
glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord.” 

Religion is primarily concerned with this matter 
of orientation and a good deal of man’s ultimate 
character is determined by the orientation of his life 
as the dawn of his day is breaking. 

To me, it is a very curious trait of modern thousne 
that it gets so easily irritated over the phenomenon 
of religion. Irritation is always a sign of mental un- 
balance. The man who refuses to deal with facts 
as facts is on the way to the madhouse and religious: 
phenomena are as much fact in human life as is bac- 
teria or logic. 

“We believe in God” is such a universal character- 
istic of man that if you care to take it out of man’s 


78 


ORIENTATION 79 


experience, you would have to re-write human his- 
tory. 

And yet, scientific writers have coined a phrase, 
“nature,” which science does not define and talks 
glibly and unscientifically about nature’s doing this 
or that. 

What is nature? <A person, a force or a bogey? 
Nobody knows. In fact the word nature is a syn- 
onym for “X” in the equation. 

“We believe in the Hereafter” is another human 
characteristic to which the human race gives univer- 
sal testimony. To the mere scientist this is ““Y” in 
the equation. 

This phenomenon is baffling to the scientific mind. 
Man is not concerned with the unknown future, but 
_ rather is concerned with man’s origin. 

If we ask the mere scientist what he things is the 
purpose of human life, he smiles in a patronizing way 
and tells you that science is concerned with the origin 
of life; but, piffle! If I ask the station master where 
this train is going to, and he tells me in a dogmatic 
fashion that my question is foolish because the train 
will pass out of his sight in a few minutes, but that 
I should be satisfied to know that this train had its 
origin in Boston, I may be pardoned if I regard him 
as mentally unbalanced. 

Mankind is anxious to know whither it is going. 
It may be that no one can answer the question, in 
which case mankind must feel as irresponsible as a 
hobo, who boards a train merely because it is going 
somewhere; but it is a silly answer to man’s earnest 
inquiry to be told science is not concerned with where 


80 CUSHIONED PEWS 


vou are going but it is on the eve of certain important 
investigations as to whence you came. 

Perhaps I came from an ape or a Shell fish, in 
either of which cases I may be said to carry with me 
unmistakeable marks of my ancestry, but I submit, 
even so, I am more concerned with whither I am go- 
ing than I am to unearth my noble pedigree. In 
other words it is unquestionably outside the sphere of 
science to tell me where I am going, but I am not 
impressed by the sanity of the savant, who tells me 
that the question is a foolish one, but that it would 
be wise for me to concern myself with where I came 
from. 

Kither question is of course permissible, but if I 
ask the former question of the science policeman and 
get snubbed for my folly, I am not going to be any 
more discouraged than if I ask the religious police- 
man where I have been and he arrests me as a SUS- 
picious character. 

There is a class of parents who resent the ques- 
tions of their children and suppress curiosity as 
childish folly, but they are stupid parents who are 
stunting the growth of their children’s mentality be- 
cause they themselves lack sense, or at least imagina- 
tion. : 

But no more so than the father of science who 
answers his child—‘‘No! my child I do not know 
where you are going. In fact do not concern your- 
self with such a silly question. I will tell you what 
I know of where you come from, for all in life which 
is worth while must be fashioned by the scientific 
code.” 


ORIENTATION 81 


He seems to be like the silly mother who refuses 
to allow her starving child to enter the bread-line 
because it is contrary to her social code that her child 
should receive bread in such fashion. 


Of course there is a scientific code and a social 
code and a political code, but life is too big a thing to 
be limited by a code. It seeks food in any case and 
asks questions because it was made that way and 
acquires character that way and arrives at its des- 
tination that way. 


I want to know why I am here and where I am 
going and if science can’t answer and society doesn’t 
satisfy my quest, then I am going to ask somebody 
else because I would be a quitter if I didn’t. 


Now let’s get back to all this code stuff and con- 
sider life in its primitive reality. 

I know that I am a creature as well as I know 
anything and if I am a creature, I know that I had 
someone who created me, never mind the method— 
and I am pretty sure, looking around the rest of cre- 
ation, that the Creator had some purpose and that I, 
like everything else, have some destiny. I ask the 
mere scientist about my destiny and am told to look 
into the past, and I shrug my shoulders and say that 
science is a fogy and something of a has been. 


I ask the mere business man about my destiny and 
he tells me to accumulate things, to be practical and 
to stop my idealism, and I shrug my shoulders and 
say that judging from those who have made a suc- 
cess in accumulating things, most of them look as 
though they had lost their last friend or never had 


2 CUSHIONED PEWS 


any—I ask them where I am going and they teil me 
to enjoy the scenery. 

I look around for some one to give an intelheeaee 
answer to my perfectly legitimate question and I find 
someone who looks spiritually intelligent. I find a 
benevolent old man, who differs from the mere scien- 
tist and the mere financier in that he looks as though 
he had some idea of life’s purpose. 

He is old in years but he has graciousness of char- 
acter, the enthusiasm of youth and the bearing of a 
gentleman, and I put my juvenile question to him and 
he tells me that I am a child of my Father in Heaven 
and that I am going to a home which He has pre- 
pared for me. 

The answer has the merit of being reasonable, in- 
telligible to a child and highly satisfactory if only 
it is true. 

This policeman acts as though he was kind and 


intelligent—qualities that did not impress themselves 


on my childish mind in the previous encounters. 
And so I ask him eagerly to tell me the way to 
satisfy my search. 


This old man tells me that he can direct me to the | 


same guide that is conducting him and that while he 
himself has not yet reached this home, nor seen this 
Father, yet thus far the guide has been so satisfac- 
tory that he recommends me to follow Him also. 

Now if you have ever been in the big woods you 
know something about guides— 

I have seen guides for whom I had such trust that 
if they had told me that they could conduct me to 
some strange and beautiful place that I would put 


ORIENTATION 83 


my life unhesitatingly into their hands, and when 
one entrusts himself to a guide in the big woods, he 
pretty nearly does that very thing. 

Now the qualities in a guide that impress you, are 
not assurance but confidence; not assertion, but hu- 
mility; not pretense but simplicity. 

And so when this old man directs me to Jesus 
Christ as my guide in the way of life, he does so not 
because he has arrived at his destination but because 
he has learned that his guide never deceives him. 

Never promises him an easy way, when it is hard; 
never boasts of what has been achieved, but presses 
toward the difficulties ahead; never is brutally in- 
different toward the sufferings of the smallest ani- 
mal, but is ever considerate of all life. 

So as the pressure of the question is an imperative 
one I accept the guidance of the Master and I learn 
three things that belong to the nature of things— 

Ist—That I must accept my guide not on His own 
testimony merely, but because of the works that He 
has done and teaches me to do.—As I learn His ways 
I follow more confidently in His footsteps. 

2nd—That if I would know His doctrine, I must 
do as He bids me. 

3rd—That in proportion as I learn His way and 
do His will, I begin to enter the kingdom which He 
assures me I[ will ultimately possess; and that as I 
deviate from His standards and His integrity, I lose 
that confidence which His presence begets in me. 

Now let us go back to our guide. No man 
is sufficient unto himself, but we all have experienced 
the joy of personal devotion to a leader. 


84 CUSHIONED PEWS 


During our childhood, the greatest joy in life was 
found in personal devotion to our parents. 

In school, it was not the wisest man that helped us 
most but the teacher to whom we were most devoted. 

In the army it was not the ablest captain but the 
most beloved who inspired us to the highest plane 
of duty. 

This then is life. 

Who is your guide? 

What Master, if you have one, commands your 
best loyal devotion? 


There are three masters of men who guide their ~ 


destinies today. 

The one is a God as revealed in mechanical force; 
the next is a God as revealed in personal ambition; 
the third is God as revealed in Jesus Christ. 

Choose then, which one you will serve. 


3 


Impotency of Selfishness 


| ae natural man is as self centered as a sav- 
age. Everything revolves around his own 
interest. He thinks about his opinions, his 
success, his prowess, his business and his diseases. 
As a matter of fact he is a drop in the ocean of life, 
but he will not admit it. He talks about his rights 
and his injuries but is not keen about his responsi- 
bilities and his own sins. 

He cultivates certain tastes and life becomes a 
passion for the gratification of these appetites. 

It may be a thirst for whiskey or the love of 
money or the desire for show. 

Whatever it is that obsesses him, he acts as though 
God had created the world in order that he might 
gratify his own little soul, and the tragedy of his 
life is that the more he gets, the more he craves. 

Possession cannot keep pace with desire. He 
worships the creature which he fondly believes will 
satisfy him and he ends by being the slave of the 
_ereature which he worships. 

He avoids God for it seems to him as though God, 
if indeed there is a God, exists to rob him of his 
heart’s desire. 

The selfish man is a spoiled child grown to man’s 
estate. 

His Heavenly Father delights in setting him 
tasks to do when he himself knows what task lies 
before him. 


85 


86 CUSHIONED PEWS 


He hasn’t time for God because God is always 
taking the joy out of his life. 

The self centered man does not believe that if 
you seek the Kingdom of God and His righteous- 
ness, all those things over which he is anxious, will 
be added unto him. The self centered man is ex- 
tremely childish in his attitude toward His Father 
in Heaven. 

Your child comes in and asks for a quarter, or 
wants to go with certain companions, and you, be- 
cause you are his father, refuse. You are thinking 
of his future life about which the child cares not a 
rap. He wants what he wants, now! 

So men grasp for this and grab for that and when 
it is denied them they curse and rave like a spoiled 
child, or they grow sullen and unapproachable. 

“God gave me these appetites,” said a young man, 
“and he is to blame if I indulge in them.” 


God gave you certain desires which are perfectly 


good and you have centered on this or that desire 
to the exclusion of its counter-balancing control, 
which God also gave you. Nothing is holier than 
the love of man for a woman and nothing more lov- 
able than children, yet the perversion of this love, 
not only has defeated the purpose of the desire, but 
has changed the child of God into a pervert. 

He then blames God for his own selfish perversion 
of a holy thing. 

He has thrown his life out of plum because he is 
disobedient to God’s will for him. 

Desire loses its beauty and fastens the bands of its 
own tyranny upon him. 


IMPOTENCY OF SELFISHNESS 87 


These men have turned the truth of God into a 
lie, and worshipped and served the creature more 
than the Creator. 

Professing themselves to be wise, they become 
fools and God permits them to reap the results 
their own self-sufficiency. 

But says the rebellious pervert, “God is all pow- 
erful and had no right to make me so weak that I 
could become a fool.” The doctrine of God’s om- 
nipotence is a curious boomerang. 

If we accept the doctrine, then we should never 
resist His power; and if we do not accept the doc- 
trine, then we have no right to claim it as an alibi. 

The omnipotence of God is governed by the om- 
niscience of God and His omniscience has so directed 
His omnipotence that He wills to have children who 
love Him by choice. 

You so will. You would not have your child grow 
up to be an automatic reflection of yourself. You 
deliberately allow him to mingle with the world in 
order that he may learn to overcome the world. 

You would not permit him to grow up in bovine 
ignorance of evil, even if you had the means to seg- 
regate him in a monastic garden of virtue. 

The truth is that we want to play the game of life 
as it is because it is a good game and because it is 
quite possible to overcome evil with good. 

If God’s Almighty power is a factor in the game 
which you admit when you are winning, then it can- 
not be a factor which you eliminate when you are 
losing. ; 

The strength of a nation is just as great as the 


88 CUSHIONED PEWS 


greatness of its ideals. Great Britain has been a 
great nation because it has had mighty men who had 
a vision of empire, and more than any other nation 
has it had the fear of God. 

Don’t mistake this statement or confuse the issue. 


I am not saying that Englishmen have been more — 


virtuous than other peoples. The one is not neces- 
sarily a corollary of the other. 

Reverence for God like reverence for parents is 
one thing and it has a tremendous influence on the 
sons and daughters of its family life. 

Personal morals is another thing, equally import- 
ant, but not at all the same thing. They ought to go 
together but do not do so necessarily. 

National reverence for God and a belief in Divine 
Providence will cause that nation to have a big 
vision and to attempt great things, even though in- 
dividually men do not live up to all that God de- 
mands of them. 

I do not know that the men who made England 
and the United States to be great nations, were bet- 
ter men personally than the present leaders of par- 
Hament and senate, but I do know that they were 
bigger men and that their vision of national respon- 
sibility was not so petty as it is now. 

And I know further that a self centered policy of 
selfish self-seeking is as dangerous to the future of 
both nations as red anarchy has been fatal to Rus- 
sia. 

It is impossible for little men to rule adequately a 
great nation. 


Better have leaders who have glaring personal 


IMPOTENCY OF SELFISHNESS 89 


faults and a big vision than little men of irre- 

proachable habits and petty self-centered policies. 

They are the kind of people who crucified Christ 
ence and have crucified His leadership ever since. 

I mean the kind of men who prate about duty 
when we are in danger and then exploit the nation 
for their own aggrandisemeent when we are at 
peace. 

There is nothing that has so nauseated me in our 
national history as that big booming voice that pro- 
claimed to American youth the necessity of their 
sacrifice during the war; which has in both England 
and America trailed off into a whine about taxes and 
a policy of national isolation. Who is so small that 
he cannot see that national isolation is a policy of 
small potatoes from every angle. 

If Europe needed England and America then, it 
needs it far more now, for it is desperately ill. 

If this be true then my son and yours went into 
the war, not for high-sounding principles which re- 
sounded then, but for the small-minded policies 
which are prevailing now. 

It is a sad thing that when we need big men in the 
senate, we should have chiefly mere money-makers. 
And selfishness is so impotent. 

Nobody ought to know this more than the average 
rich man who shows boredom in his face. I will 
guarantee that there is more complaining, murmur- 
ing and discontent in the homes of those who have 
made much during the war, than there is in the 
homes of those whose sons paid the supreme price 
of their idealism. 


90 CUSHIONED PEWS 


They increased their goods and are so bored that 
in innumerable cases man and wife cannot live to- 
gether. . 

But selfishness is no more important in the homes 
of the new rich than it is in the ranks of labor. 

General Pershing struck a responsive chord when 
he reminded the unions that patriotism was the 
product of the individual American and not selfish 
eorporations, whether of capital or labor. 


The laboring man has avowedly rejected God and 
gone after his rights. 

Let us assume that he has a perfect right to do 
this. What has been the result? 


Their leadership has also been self-seeking. Men 
who are not lovers of God are not lovers of their 
fellow-men and when they get into positions of 
- power they feel no more love for their fellow-labor- 
ing men than they are capable of showing for their 
personal friends. They become bosses because they 
are selfish men. Men like Trotsky and Bill Hayward 
do not love their fellowmen. They merely envy and 
hate those who are in the saddle, and when they in 
turn are in the saddle they are more ruthless than 
their predecessors. 

I am sure that there is no hope for labor without 
God in the world. 

They may get shorter hours and more wages but 
their children will not rise up and call them blessed, 
for they are not the men that their fathers were. 


No man can be great who is merely self-centered. 
No nation can be mighty when selfishness has 


Le eee 


IMPOTENCY OF SELFISHNESS oI 


broken its ranks into class hatreds and those who 
demand special privileges for their particular class. 

When more than sixty percent of a nation has 
rejected God, that nation is in a fair way to be- 
come apostate, and when a whole nation becomes 
an aggregation of self-seeking individuals, it will 
lose its power, whether that power be commercial, 
political or moral. 

We will be justly despised of the nations which | 
are ill, when our policy of isolation demands that 
- we be clothed in purple and fine linen and that we 
fare sumptuously every day. 


Unionized Religion | 
():: of our leading weekly periodicals recently 


ran a series of communications in which va- | 


rious persons told the world “what the mat- 
ter is with the Church.” 

In very few of these letters was there any adequate 
appreciation of the fact that the chief trouble with 
the Church is, the people. 

The Church as a potent factor in civilization is 
scarcely on trial. 

It has been demonstrated time and again what it 
could do with people. 

It was the one potent factor which tamed and 
civilized the Anglo-Saxon savages and Scandinavian 
pirates from whom we are descended. 

It is the only potent factor that has ever at- 
tempted to do anything with Fiji cannibals and 
Polynesian head-hunters. 

It is the only instrument of our rather smug civil- 
ization which has ever carried its benevolent in- 
fluence into Uganda or Metlakatla. 

The only other stimulants, whieh the Caucasian 
race has ever attempted to give the savage, have 
been racial prejudices and bad whiskey. 

Really the Church as an institution has done so 
much more for the race than the modern critics of 
the Church are doing that it would be more seemly 
for the people to confess their own sin in abandon- 
ing the one instrument of grace that the world has 


92 


a ee _ 


UNIONIZED RELIGION 93 


known and substituting generalizing negations for 
personal service. 

The real trouble with agriculture is usually poor 
soil and muddled heads. 

As a rule the Providence of God is to be depended 
upon; but, strange to say, whenever a flood or an 
earthquake destroys the crops, it is called a visita- 
tion of God. 

Why that curious name? God visits us with sun- 
light and rain and fertile soil, yet we emphasize 
exceptional acts of destruction as His visits. 

Man is prone to lay the blame of things on God. 

What is this Church that is so frequently dis- 
cussed? 

It is so easy to enter a general indictment against 
a mere fiction of the mind. It must be apparent that 
the Church is one of two things: Either it is the 
instrument of God to convey grace to men, or else 
it is the creation of men to convey information to 
God. 

Either it is an organization founded by Christ to 
tell men about God, or else it is an ecclesiastical 
union organized by men to tell God what man wants. 

You belong either to the Corporate Body of Christ 
or else to the union. | 

If you belong to the Corporate Body you are apt 
to be long on your privileges as a member of the 
Corporation and are apt to be looking for dividends 
more than service. 

And if you belong to the union you are apt to be 
long on grievances and short on a sense of personal 
responsibility. 


94 CUSHIONED PEWS 


The old mediaeval corporation was apt to abuse its 
privileges. The Reformation was a unionizing of 
religious workers, and they are strong in airing 
their grievances and shouting for shorter hours of 
- service and better wages in the way of ecclesiastical 
attractions. 


And the worst of it is that the shorter the hours 
and the better the sermon the less labor one gets in 
return. 

The best laborers I know in the Church are not 
the product of fine sermons, but rather of a good 
conscience. 

These new ecclesiastical unions want none of that 
“penny a day” stuff, although they are rather keen 
for the eleventh-hour privileges. 


They hang about the market place and tell us how 
the Church should be run, but no burden and heat 
of the day for them. 


It is true that no man has hired them, but not 
because they have received no invitation to work, 
but because they are on a strike for shorter hours 
and better sermons. 


Men are very prone to complain about the weather, 
their religion and the policies of the administration. 

This is not a sign of an enlightened conscience, 
nor of a constructive mind, but rather that the dis- 
ease is catching. It is easy to condemn a govern- 
ment that you couldn’t run to save your life and to 
tell what the Church ought to do when you yourself 
are doing nothing. 

The only legitimate critic is the hard worker, and 





UNIONIZED RELIGION 95 


he is so engrossed in his work that he forgets to 
criticize. 

There is a quadruped who whenever he stops work 
begins to kick and bray. He is a fairly intelligent 
animal, but has an unsociable disposition. 

The vineyard is here, and it is the Lord’s will that 
we should work therein. The fact that we have 
poor overseers and poor grub does not justify a 
strike, for, after all, God is expecting us to work 
and isn’t interested in our complaints. 

A poor preacher may be His test of your sincerity, 
and I doubt whether He will accept your alibi when 
pay day comes. 

Ruskin has defined a critic as “a painter who can- 
not paint, himself.” 

It is a suggestive definition and fairly comprehen- 
sive in its conclusiveness. 

We may as well recognize that the Kingdom of 
Heaven includes the Corporation and the workers 
and that the interest of one is the interest of both. 

The Church must go on and do the work that it 
is ordained of God to do. If those who temporarily 
represent the Corporation are poor “ stuff,” the 
workers in the vineyard do not please God by going 
cn a strike. They merely please themselves and the 
vineyard grows more weedy and less productive. 

We are not going to improve the spiritual force 
which the Church has always contained when men 
stir up the gift of the Spirit, by pulling out of the 
Kingdom. 

The truth is that God made a Church which He 
never intended should be acceptable to quitters. 


96 CUSHIONED PEWS 


It is the grit of continuance in good works which 
God demands, and those who murmur are destroyed 
by the serpents of anger, envy and hate, and those 
who persist in complaining are destroyed by the 
Destroyer. , 

If the Church in any particular age has been run 
down (as it frequently has) then it has owed its res- 
urrection to the persistence of good men who stick 
to the Cross of Christ, when all the rabble about is 
gabbing. 

It boils itself down to this: 

Your life is your job and God is your Master. 

He knows what is going on better than you do, 
and it is harder for Him to put up with poor priests 
than it is for you to put up with poor preachers. 

If He sends you into no man’s land of spiritual 
desolation, He expects you to carry on with the same 
fidelity to Him that you would manifest if you held 
a title deed to the Garden of Eden. 

The real answer to the complaint is to be found 
in your definition of the Church. 3 

Is God a hard Master who calls you to an unprof- 
itable job? If so, then strike, but do not imagine that 
you have reached the end of the question. You are 
as responsible as Trotsky for what happens after- 
ward, for you have contributed to the chaos by your 
desertion of the forces that make for law and order. 


Poor Relations 


T IS a very general sentiment among business 
| men today, that true charity consists in helping 
people to help themselves. 

Because of this sentiment, many busy people are 
discharging their duty of philanthropy by writing 
a check which some professional charity worker dis- 
burses, having divided said check into overhead, 
underfoot and under-the-belt expenses. 

This charity becomes a part of the industrial sys- 
tem in which we are condemned to lose our identity 
by the beneficient will of our secular deities, known 
once as Mammon, and now as Magnates. 

No magnate, big or small, likes to feel that some 
poor barnacle is attaching itself to the polished sides 
of his vessel. He does not like to be leaned upon too 
heavily by poor relations. 

It is bad for the poor relations and disquieting for 
the magnates. 

I wonder sometimes if God hasn’t a lot of poor 
relation who are leaning upon Him very hard. 

We speak of God as the “‘Giver of all good things,” 
and we may not like to confess it but even the richest 
of us are beggars in God’s sight. 

Now there is no disgrace in being the recipients of 
gifts— 

For we receive our life and all that we have as a 
gift from God. 

“We are saved by grace, and that not of ourselves, 
it is the gift of God.” . 


97 


98 CUSHIONED PEWS 


The disgrace lies in the way in which we make 
our returns for the gift received. 

One way to avoid assuming any responsibility of 
gratitude is to deprive God of personality and call 
Him force. Of course, we can receive water from a 
faucet without manifesting any act of gratitude in 
return. 

So we speak of God as nature, and say that “Na- 
ture gives so and so’”—and then we are under no 
obligation to make any return in worship. 

The moment we believe in a personal God, we 
fasten upon ourselves the responsibility for return- 
ing thanks to the person who gives us those good 
things. 

The moment we realize that we are the recipients 
of God’s charity, then we must see that the rules 
which we apply to our poor, appiy likewise to His 
poor; and those rules are, that we do not waste that 
which has been given us by the kindness of another; 
that we make some act of appreciation for the gratu- 
ity that we have received; and that we use the gifts 
thus received so as to develop in us the spirit of self- 
help. 

This seems to be the threefold purpose of religion. 

Ist. We are like the poor miner who has been 
grub-staked. 

God has given us all things necessary to search 
for treasure. 

The question is, what are we looking for? Riches 
for ourselves, or treasure for God? And our treas- 
ure is not His treasure. He is perfectly willing that 
we should seek and enjoy our treasure, if we will 


POOR RELATIONS 99 


show some interest in returning to Him that which 
He seeks, 

And what can we give God that He wants, in re- 
turn for that which He has given us? 

We can give Him worship, which is a kind of 
gratitude; and we can give Him our love, which is 
@ surrender of ourselves. Or we can shrivel up into 
a thankless, self-important atom. 

God must be very tired of the crowd of poor rela- 
tions, who take from Him and are impressed only 
with their own arrogance. 

Certainly He will no more permit flesh to glory in 
His presence than would an ordinary millionaire 
allow a poor relation to flaunt his own importance in 
his face. 

There is a modesty which rich beggars ought to 


seek. | 
2nd. Ingratitude is the basest of vices, and the 


ingrate the least attractive of all beggars. 

Let your requests and supplications be made unto 
God with thanksgiving, and then, and only then, will 
the peace of God rule in your hearts. 


One can understand how men, who believe in a 
blind force as the giver of all good things, feel no 
obligation to be grateful. But a man who believes 
in God must expect such God to believe in gratitude. 


We do not merely worship God because He needs 
it; we worship God also to preserve our self-respect. 
If. all good gifts come from the Father of light, then 
there can be but one adequate return for those gifts, 
and that is adoration. 


eras 
oe ie 


100 CUSHIONED PEWS 


It is just this attitude of mind that differentiates 
beggars from one another. 

Better be a beloved vagabond than a churlish boor, 
which is about the measure of some of God’s pros- 
perous poor relations. 

But we are told by experts that there is one real 
purpose in charity; and that is to teach the poor to 
help themselves, so that they can be self-respecting. 

It’s a poor rule that doesn’t work both ways. And 
unless we receive our blessings from a faucet, then 
perchance, God is watching His beneficiaries to see 
whether the manhood which He desires is being 
created by the blessings that he bestows. 

He is very generous to us; are we generous to 
athers ? 

He puts up with many slights from us; are we 
equally patient with others? 

He sent His son into the world to give us a stand- 
ard of manhood that none are brash enough to 
question. 

Are God’s gifts to us having such an effect, that 
we are even anxious to grow more like Him? 

It is odd that God’s blessings either make us more 
human or more trivial. 

The more human seek to find their joy in helping 
others. 

The more trivial lose their joy in fussing about 
what they have failed to get. 

There is nothing more pitiful in God’s world than 
one of God’s poor relations, with his arms full of 
things, frantically grabbing for more things, with 
no gratitude and much complaining. 


POOR RELATIONS 101 


We are all God’s poor relations. We cannot help 
that; but we can be decent poor relations and not 
selfish pigs if we believe that He is interested in the 
charity He administers. 


Sins of the Church 


HRIST came to a world in which fear, hate 
C and cruelty ruled in the person of the Caesars. 

Caligula, Nero, Domitian were imperial cow- 
ards who feared, hated and cruelly abused those who 
surrounded them. 

When such brutes sat on thrones, liberty was in 
chains and righteousness perished in the arena. 

The mob was frivolous, brutal, pitiless. There was 
no Church then to blame. 

For three centuries Christians lived in constant 
dread that their very innocence would cause them to 
be thrown to the lions or torn asunder by the wolf- 
pack. 

The security in mich we live was won by the 
blood of martyrs who refused to sacrifice their con- 
victions. There was no motto of “Safety First’ in 
the course which they pursued. 

They held not their lives dear but gave them 
bravely, more bravely than soldiers on the field of 
hattle, for the love of Christ. 

It is strictly true that the blood of these martyrs 
was the seed not only of the Church but of constitu- 
tional government as well. 

“The deepest, nay, the only theme of the world’s 
history, to which all others are subordinate,” said 
Goethe, “is the conflict of faith and unbelief.’ 

To which Mr. Lecky adds: 

“The epochs in which faith, in whatever form it 
may be, prevails, are the marked epochs in human 


102 


SINS OF THE CHURCH 103 


history, full of heart-stirring memories and of sub- 
stantial gains for all after-times. 

The epochs in which unbelief, in whatever form 
it may be, prevails, even when for a moment they 
put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably 
sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity which 
will not waste its thoughts on things barren and un- 
fruitful.”’ So speak the great poet and the eminent 
historian of recent times. 

And this is so because there is but one motive that 
is potent enough to restrain men from the selfish 
lusts which consume them; and to incite them to 
those active efforts which make possible home and 
iatherland. 

Men who think as superficially about life as do 
those who exaggerate the value of material success, 
imagine that by endowing institutions of learning, 
one safeguards best these institutions; but they were 
not produced by wealth nor has the great increase 
of schools and colleges made the home more sacred 
or kept our political institutions more holy. 

To quote Mr. Lecky once more (and he surely is 
a dispassionate witness) in speaking of the Church: 

“None of the modern influences of society can be 
said to have superseded it. Modern experience has 
furnished much evidence of the insufficiency of 
mere intellectual education, if it is unaccompanied 
by the education of character, and it is on this side 
that modern education is most defective.” 

Yet the whole temper of American life is satur- 
ated with the idea that learning is a substitute for 
grace in the training of future Americans. We 


104 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Christians send our children to be educated in uni- 
versities where the atmosphere is cynical of faith, 
and if we have surplus wealth to leave we endow 
these institutions regardless of the trend which they 
may adopt toward our traditional faith or our con- 
stitutional government. 


We refuse to recognize the value of love as Christ 
embodied it as an essential factor in Christian edu- 
cation. Why? 

Because we do not ourselves possess it, and we 
do not possess it because we value it lightly. 


And yet such love does more to make home and 
country than any quantity of biological facts ar- 
ranged in orderly sequence. Mere education may re- 
sult in more push buttons and better carburetors, but 
it can no more make homes than can a furniture 
emporium. 


Faith, hope and charity are the three musketeers 
which St. Paul summoned to overthrow the false 
civilization of the Roman Empire and the greatest of 
these is charity, but for all that they go together, “all 
for one and one for all,” and where one is effective, 
it is because it is attended by the other two. 

In looking around for the forces which the Church 
needs today to win her victories, let us not despise 
these three, for without them the Church is impotent 
to carry on its nation-wide campaign. 

It is not primarily a question of cajoling our con- 
stituents to put millions in our treasury but it is pri- 
marily a question of converting souls to God—so that 
not only wealth is consecrated, but men, and men will 


SINS OF THE CHURCH 105 


be consecrated only as they believe, have courage and 
are lovers of mankind. 

In all the eager attempts of various denominations 
to gain supremacy it is curious that none seem to 
specialize in these qualities for they are sorely lack- 
ing in the Church atmosphere of America. 

As one priest has well put it, ““How can we kindle 
hearts with coals from the altar when we have to 
drag them through a refrigerator to do so?” 

Nor is this coldness something of which the Church 
is guilty and you are absolved. Rather, it is that the 
Church is cold because your love is cold. 

Christ did not endow a cold Church with His 
Spirit; nor did the Christians who overcome organ- 
ized paganism do it because they had joined a re- 
frigeration plant. 

Put this down as fundamentally true: The Churecn 
is cold because my faith is cold and I am no better 
than my neighbors if I stand still and talk about the 
weather. 

If you will do a fair amount of intelligent exercise 
you will develop a glow that will not only keep you 
from the cold but will help to warm someone else. 

Whence then, come these icy drafts? They come 
from the doors and windows which the Church opens 
to the world. 

The worldliness of a cold world blows through 
these open doors and chills all who have that per- 
nicious anaemia of little faith. 

In the early days the Church was a potent influ- 
ence in the world. Today the world is a powerful 
influence in the Church and because we have flimsy 


108 CUSHIONED PEWS 


garments we get chilled through and through. Let 
us examine some of these icy drafts which chill en- 
thusiasm and produce goose-flesh instead of ruddy 
skin. | 

First, the gospel of the glassy eye, which is so pow- 
erful in keeping the requisite distance between caste 
and caste that it has invaded the sanctity of the 
friendly Nazarene. 

We are deluged with prosperous people who regard 
the treasures of Egypt as greater riches than the re- 
proach of Christ, utterly oblivious to the fact that 
the hauteur of worldly society is an impertinence in 
the shop of the Nazarene carpenter. 


Social conventions, expensive costumes and frigid 
demeanor may be aw fait in good society but they are 
de trop in the courts of heaven. 

When can we learn that we do not go into God’s 
house to magnify ourselves, and that the more ex- 
alted we may be among our fellow-men the more 
humble we must be before the King of Kings. 


Our majesty may be very real to us in a gilded 
salon, but it ought to shrink into its true proportions 
before His infinite Majesty. 

The Christ was often majestic among men, espe- 
cially important people, but He was always most 
humble before God. 

Just because the Church of Christ must surround 
its members with the atmosphere of courtesy and 
good manners, is the reason why we are patronized 
so often by the four hundred, but it is no reason why 
priests and prelates as well as Church wardens and 


SINS OF THE CHURCH 107 


vestrymen should so often acquiesce in giving the 
Church all the frigid dullness of a social function. 

We need to lose our self-consciousness in the con- 
sciousness of Christ. If we are putting on Christ, 
we will unconsciously stop thinking of ourselves. 

And then there is the icy draught that comes from 
the counting house. Christ cleared out the tables 
of the money-changers, but He could not drive out 
their influence. 

Before Christ each capitalist or practical business 
man should be as he is in his own family circle, un- 
less he is altogether mammonized—just himself. 

I do not know that skill in handling securities 
should give a man any special influence in the House 
of Him who is seeking other treasures. 

A Church is not primarily a business concern and 
while it is perfectly true that business men have the 
right to help the parish to be conducted along right 
business lines, they have no right to superimpose the 
worldly vision of business upon the ideals of the 
God-man. 

Christ did not come to take lessons from financiers 
but to save them from themselves. 

And the third worldly influence that keeps the 
Church cold is the dead furnace which ought to keep 
it warm. 

I refer to the ranks of labor, from whom were 
Peter and John and Christ. These suffered gladly 
for an ideal, but that element which ought to be the 
backbone of the venture which Christ made, like 
Peter, deny him with a curse. 

That which should be the element from which 


108 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Christ gathers his disciples, seeks a worldly king- 
dom, follows Godless leaders, whines about its rights, 
and ditches its responsibilities. 

Rich man! poor man! begger man! thief! The 
same man, with the same passions, until the love of 
Christ becomes the guiding motive of His life; then 
his temporal condition is lost in the service of the 
Master. 

He has found the pearl of great price and sold 
all to possess it. 

When will we cease to hear these vaporings about 
the sins of the Church? 

She exists to fulfill the purpose of her Divine Mas- 
ter but she can succeed only when those who are 
violently in love with Christ take it by force and by 
love make it the force that Christ himself was and 
that the Church also was when the members who 
composed it suffered all things for the love of Christ. 

If the Church fails, it is because you and I are 
cold—for there is just one thing which will warm the 
Church and that is members who themselves are 
possessed with the love of Christ and this it lacks 
because men lack love. 

What Christ lacked then was not warmth but those 
who were willing to suffer with Him for love. 

What the Church lacks today is not warmth but 
those who are willing to suffer loss for His sake. 

The Church needs men of wealth who do not inflict 
the Church with the idea that it exists to make se- 
curities more secure, but that it exists to make men 
more human. The Church needs laboring men who 
esteem the love of Christ as more potent than the 


SINS OF THE CHURCH 109 


wealth they envy, and who have never won any bat- 
tle by force, but only as they themselves have become 
conquerors by being more righteous than their mas- 
ters. 

The Church needs men of good manners who es- 
teem the reproach of Christ great riches than the 
treasures of society. 


Foundations 


ET me quote from Chesterton’s “What I Saw 
in America” because that which I am quoting 
would be the very thing that one would expect 
Chesterton to see. It is one of the outstanding fea- 
tures of a democracy like ours that it should be eter- 
nally questioning the foundations of its faith and 
everlastingly endeavoring to find other foundations 
upon which can be built a structure that will give 
us all of the benefits of a democracy without requir- 
ing the individual citizen to put forth that strenuous 
effort by which alone a democracy can be preserved. 
As Chesterton truly says, “There is no basis for 
democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin 
of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the 
modern world will find out more and more to be a — 
fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental com- 
parison, full of merely verbal echoes of the older 
creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain 
for the vital purpose of constraining the tryant. An 
idealist may say to a capitalist, ‘Don’t you sometimes 
feel in the dim twilight, when the lights twinkle 
from the distant hamlet in the hills, that all humanity 
is a holy family? But it is equally possible for the 
Capitalist to reply with brevity and decision, ‘No, I 
don’t,’ and there is no more disputing about it further 
than about the beauty of a fading cloud.” 
In other words unless you build your structure of 
sentiment upon foundations of definite conviction, 
you are building upon sands. 


110 


FOUNDATIONS 111 


Foundations are not spectacular things; they cost 
a lot of time and effort; they consist of solid and sub- 
stantial material; they are not capable of inducing 
sentimental rapsodies; but they have to be there 
unless you are prepared to see the whole structure 
tumble down for the lack of them. 

Definite convictions are the only true foundations 
of beautiful sentiment, and when the necessity of the 
foundation is ignored, the ruin of the building, how- 
ever beautiful, is merely a question of time. 

There is no more dangerous lunatic in the whole 
community, than the builder who says, never mind 
about the foundations, let us put up the structure. 


Let me quote Chesterton again: 


“Hundreds have heard the story about the medi- 
aeval demagogue who went about repeating the 
rhyme: 

When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Who was then the gentleman? 


“Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer 
to the question,—‘The Serpent.’ But few seem to 
have noticed what would be the more modern answer 
to the question if that innocent agitator went about 
propounding it. Adam never delved and Eve never 
span, for the simple reason that they never existed. 
They are fragments of a Chaldean-Babylonian myth 
and Adam is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pro- 
nounced better. 

“For the real beginning of humanity we refer you 
to ‘Darwin’s Origin of Species.’ And then the mod- 
ern man would go on to justify plutocracy to the 


112 CUSHIONED PEWS 


mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle of Life 
and the Survival of the Fittest; and how the strong- 
est man seized authority by means of anarchy, and 
proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad. 

‘‘Now I do not base my beliefs on the theolegy of 
John Ball, or on the literal and materialistic reading 
of the text of Genesis, though I think the story of 
Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and unlikely 
than that of the prehistoric strongest man who could 
fight a hundred men. 

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically 
bases all rights on the fact that God created all men 
equal; and it is right; for if they were not created 
equal, they were certainly evolved unequal.” 

Once more let me quote: 

“Nine times out of ten a man’s broadmindedness 
is necessarily the narrowest thing about him. His 
vision of his own village may be really full of vari- 
eties; and even his vision of his own nation may have 
a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision 


of the world is probably smaller than the world; his 


vision of the universe is certainly much smaller than 
the universe. Hence he is never so inadequate as 
when he is universal; he is never so limited as when 
he generalizes. 

“This is the fallacy in many modern attempts at a 
creedless creed, as something variously described as 
essential Christianity, or undenominational religion 
or a world faith to embrace all the faiths in the 
world.” . 

This is rather a long text for the observations 
which I desire to make. 


ee 


FOUNDATIONS 113 


Back of our democracy there is a constitution and 
the reason why we have carried on as a democracy 
without running amuck, as they have run in Russia 
and did run in France, is because we had some con- 
stitutionalists at the foundation of our government. 
Washington and Hamilton and Marshall gave us a 
foundation upon which Jefferson and Madison and 
Monroe helped to build a republic. 

Had we had nothing but constitutionalists we 
would have had:a Monarchy and had we had nothing 
but sentimentalists we would have ended in chaos. 

Liberty, fraternity and equality are fine words but 
unless they are builded upon certain Constitutional 
foundations, they will not weather the storms. 

The Church is in danger from sentimentalists who 
boast that they have no theology; grow impatient at 
any dogmatic statements and want to build a beau- 
tiful air castle upon their rather attractive personal- 
ities. 

“Other foundations for the Christian Church can- 
not be laid than that which is laid” and that founda- 
tion is the life of Jesus Christ as witnessed by the 
Apostles. 

When modern Christians propose to substitute for ~ 
the foundations of the Christian Church the dog- 
matic statements of modern science, they are sub- 
stituting a material that has never shown its ability 
to stand the strain for one that has stood for cen- 
_turies, and is as strong today as it has ever been. 

Science deals with a cosmos of mechanical pro- 
cesses; and it helps us to understand the mechanical 
purpose of the universe. Religion deals with a uni- 


114 CUSHIONED PEWS 


verse of personal relationships and helps us to under- 
stand the moral purpose of the universe. 

If a father attempted to bring up his children by 
invoking the principles of applied mechanics, he 
would have about the same kind of a family as we 
will have when we have a Church based upon purely 
scientific principles. 

Science has its sphere of operation, but it is help- 
less in the sphere of personal relationships. 

You cannot arrive at a knowledge of God by scien- 
tific methods any more than you can invoke the laws 
of mechanics to enter into personal friendships. 
Whatever God is, I am very sure that He does not 
exist for the purpose of furnishing arrogant curios- 
ity seekers with a solution of their problems. 

The Church has done its work because it has been 
able to inspire men with love of a person as the mo- 
tivation of human conduct; and it never has and 
never can do its work because it has a foundation in 
speculative analysis. } 

A scientific dogma is an hypothesis based upon 
certain ascertained facts from which the attempt is 
made to draw certain conclusions. The dogmas of 
science change as new facts are ascertained and they 
are limited by the large pleroma of unascertained 
facts which always surround us. 

The dogmas of the Christian religion are based 
upon the experience of certain chosen witnesses as to 
the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. 

The data for altering those facts is manifestly 
lacking. We cannot enter into that personal rela- 
tionship which the Apostles enjoyed. 


, 
Ie i i i - 


FOUNDATIONS 115 


We must either accept their testimony or reject it. 
We cannot reconstruct the life of Jesus Christ as the 
result of scientific investigation. In so far as Chris- 
tian dogma deals with His birth, death, resurrection 
and ascension we cannot re-examine the witnesses. 
We can merely advance certain theories of explana- 
tion which in the nature of the case cannot take the 
place of the original facts. 


The Masculine Ingredient 


HAVE just come from a Church meeting. 
I There were eight or ten business men. These 

men stood high in their community which is 
not a large one. Nearly all of them were confirmed 
members of the Church. They were all men scrup- 
ulously honest, unusually intelligent, good fathers 
and good husbands. 

These men,.as is usually the case with members of 
this Church, were upstanding men in the community 
where they lived. 

They stood for public improvements, were gen- 
erous contributors to any movement for the uplift 
of the young. They were absolutely without cant. 
They abhorred any mechanical conception of re- 
ligion in which they would be mere puppets. They 
were leaders in business, efficient in public works, 
standing for the very best in American politics. But 
one thing was lacking as one studied and admired 
them. 

They lacked definite religious convictions. They 
had no spiritual enthusiasms. They made no per- 
sonal sacrifices in exerting a spiritual influence. 

And the one thing, which transforms a man into 
& spiritual force for righteousness, and which that 
particular community sorely needed they could not 
or did not supply. 

My mind travels to another scene in which a judge 
is reported to have said in a juvenile court: “There 
seems to be a wave of juvenile crime passing over 


116 


THE MASCULINE INGREDIENT 117 


America today, and the culprits seem to lack any 
appreciation of the seriousness of their offenses.”’ 
Expressed in another way, there is scarcely a com- 
munity in America today, where, when the time 
comes for young boys to form their associates, par- 
ents are not seriously concerned as to the influences 
which shall surround these boys. 


And this apprehension is felt equally in small 
towns or large cities. Those who can afford it, look 
for a private school in which their boys can escape 
the temptations of the gang. It is a mooted ques- 
tion whether it is safer to bring boys up in the rough 
atmosphere of the streets or in the artificial atmos- 
phere of the ordinary private school. Shall I run 
the risk of having my boy grow up tough or snob- 
bish? And yet the communities in which these boys 
grow up are places where boys ape men, and try to 
be like the men whom they know. 


And who are the men that they imitate? Those 
who appeal to the boy’s weakness. The man who 
is democratic, coarse and hearty exerts an influence 
over youth that good clothes, good manners, and good 
habits do not exert unless they make a distinct 
effort to do so. It requires a considerable effort 
for the man to learn good maners, good habits and 
good morals. 


But when he has learned these marks of the Chris- 
tian gentleman, it requires far more effort for him 
to carry his influence into the realm of boyhood. 
He can do it as no other man can, but he cannot do 
it unless he makes a distinct effort to do it, for the 


118 CUSHIONED PEWS 


boy has not yet arrived at the point where these 
things appeal to him. 

In other words, we have a condition in Christian 
America which is rather appaling. 

The American man is not a force in stimulating 
young boys to imitate him, because his spiritual con- 
victions are passive rather than active; he is not 
thinking in terms of spiritual influence; he esteems 
the message of the gospel but he is not a force in 
making it felt among the young. He will work 
hard to leave money for his children to spend, but 
he will not press hard to give a spiritual inheritance 
to the young. 

On the other hand evil men are always a forecee— 
just as diphtheria is an epidemic which spreads 
easily; while anti-toxin is the result of much labor 
and great effort. 

We need an anti-toxin to the moral and spiritual 
epidemics that are raging in America today among 
the young. And what should that anti-toxin be? 
I know of no other successful resistant than an ag- 
gressive spiritual force which may be exerted by 
Christian men. 

We rather expect that the clergy and mothers 
should look after the morals of the young, and they 
do so as far as they can. But no man has an alibi 
from doing his share to raise American boys in high 
ideals. 

Man can raise cattle and hogs; they can erect 
buildings and railways; they can form lodges and 
clubs; but they are not exerting the moral and spir- 
itual force upon youth that is so urgently needed. 


THE MASCULINE INGREDIENT 119 


The problem begins when the boy is about twelve 
years of age. 

He is under women at school and in Sunday school; 
he is under his mother at home and he is under the 
gang influence on the street. Where does the man 
come in at that time when a man is needed to mould 
the growing boy? 

Is the father vitally interested in his son’s spir- 
itual development? Is the good man as concerned 
with the growing boys in his community as he is in 
the shade trees or the paving? 

Is the rector aided by strong men, who being 
strong themselves are capable of imparting just the 
tone to education which the adolescent youth re- 
quires? 

It is all right to be a success in your business or 
profession, but that very success should establish a 
sense of gratitude to God so you will be anxious to 
pass on what has been received as a contributing 
force in the spiritual development of the rising 
youth. 

It is all right to enjoy the perquisites of one’s own 
success, but there is one thing lacking when we feel 
no gratitude for what we have received and no re- 
sponsibility to pass on our influence. 

The Church is a mixture and it is only when the 
mixture is right that the influence is effective. 

We need the scholarly, cultivated rector who is 
the prophet, priest and pastor. 

We need the conscientious, consecrated devotion 
of holy women. We need the bright enthusiasm of 
children. 


120 CUSHIONED PEWS 


We need also the strong practical influence of suc- 
cessful men. If the mixture fails to move the car, 
it is because the last ingredient is lacking or it not 
~ present in sufficient quantity. 


The religious man is too apt to be an unbalanced 
character, who functions in the ecclesiastical field 
because it is unoccupied. And then when someone 
whom red-blooded men do not particularly respect, 
takes hold to contribute whatever there is of the 
masculine ingredient, your strong man turns petu- 
lantly away and says, “If that is masculine religion, 
I want none of it.” 


He is too self-centered to see that his very atti- 
tude is fatal to the growing boy, and that his excuse 
does not relieve him from responsibility, but rather 
increases it. What business has he to turn away 
from just that responsibility? Who has excused 
him from the draft? 


Who has countersigned his alibi? The Church 
is a volunteer army except as the Lord drafts men 
through their own consciences. 


Is it a sufficient sop to one’s conscience to reply 
to God, ‘“‘This weakling is serving Thee in the 
Church. I am therefore exempt and will leave the 
future of American boys to a diluted masculine in- 
fluence?” There is no alibi for any Christian man 
by which he has any right to enjoy the blessings of 
God’s bounty and then exempt himself from the re- 
sponsibility of doing that which God lays at his 
grate. 

I believe Christian influence is suffering more to- 


THE MASCULINE INGREDIENT 121 


day from holding back of the masculine ingredient 
as a spiritual force than from any other cause. 

The Church has men. She has a right to look to 
them as spiritual forces. 

Nor is it an adequate excuse to say that you are 
doing this through a lodge or club. The lodge and 
the club have their use, but the Lord God estab- 
lished the Church to be the instrument through 
which moral and spiritual forces should be exerted. 

Who are you that substitutes something which 
vou declare to be just as good when God has bidden 
vou to do this one thing? Would you really dare to 
make this excuse, face to face with your Judge, that 
you had no confidence in the instrument which He 
had established and had substituted something else; 
especially when the chief trouble with God’s instru- 
ment is the withdrawal of your own force from its 
energy? 


Wicked Lambs 


N DENVER recently we had the trial and con- 
I viction of a score of bunco men who had vic- 

timized a large number of credulous folk with 
a clever swindle by which the victims were supposed 
to get a large sum of money for a relative small in- 
vestment. ° 

The swindlers had considerable capital and it cost 
the state a whole lot of money to convict them. 

After they had been incarcerated an attorney said 
to me: ‘The state ought now to prosecute the vic- 
tims.” After considering the matter awhile I 
thought the point was well taken, for from the stand- 
point of honesty and integrity the lambs were no 
better than the wolves, simply more foolish. 

And so my mind went back to the words of the 
practical Apostle, “Be ye doers of the Word and not 
hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” Surely 
the man who deceives himself is living a fake life. 
Unfortunately, it is so easy to deceive ourselves. 

We never fool God; we seldom fool our neighbors 
for a long period of time; we are so prone to fool 
9urselves, and as soon as we have succeeded in fool- 
ing ourselves we become the prey of all sorts of 
fakirs. 

For a fakir has very little chance of victimizing a 
man who has real convictions. 

The world is full of Lydia Pinkhams, Get-Rich- 
Quick Wallingfords, Professional Soul Savers, Poli- 
tical Demagogues, Philosophical Quacks, Predatory 


122 


WICKED LAMBS 123 


Prophets and Prophetesses just because there are so 
many people who do not think straight, who lack 
definite moral convictions and whose flabby con- 
sciences are willing to make a personal profit by 
subordinating a principle to some immediate per- 
sonal advantage. 

If they are poor, they will do anything to get rich; 
if they are sick they will do anything to get well; if 
they are conscience-stricken they will do anything 
to get saved, no matter whether the “anything” is 
unreasonable, immoral and manifestly impossible. 

In other words, they fancy that God has made a 
world in which privileged persons may do evil in 
order that good may come. 

Their immediate necessity seems to be the mother 
of their inventions to fool themselves into thinking 
that they are fooling God. 

The great sin of this so-called practical age is the 
failure to so evaluate morals as to put them first in 
their standard of life. Let me enumerate the sins 
of unreality to which human greed and vanity will 
carry our poor human nature so that we become the 
victims of predatory professionals. 

The first guilt of unreality that finds lodgment in 
the human brain is the exaggeration of our individ- 
ual importance because of some purely extraneous 
accident. 

This may be due to the fact that we have inherited 
or accumulated wealth, knowledge, social position or 
political influence. 3 

As soon as a man fancies that he is something of 
a superman or miniature Kaiser, he substitutes 


124 CUSHIONED PEWS 


sham for reality and becomes the eager victim of 
psychical sharpers who appeal to his vanity and de- 
stroy his sanity. 

He fancies that because he can command servants 
or disciples or social climbers that he belongs to a 
distinctive caste which is in some mysterious way 
superior to the contacts and reactions of ordinary 
life. 

All one can say is that he is due for a tremendous 
cropper in the Day of Judgment, even if he carries 
his fiction into an elegant and capacious mausoleum. 

There are no supermen as the Lord Jesus very 
plainly indicated, and we are in reality every one 
members one of another, for God has made of one 
blood all nations of the earth and there is no respect 
cf persons. 

The men who hasn’t humility is the hopeless vic- 
tim of attractive liars. He may be practical in every 
other way, but is believing a lie when he fancies him- 
self superior to the common obligations of us all. 

I know of nothing that requires closer self-scru- 
tiny than the absolute necessity cf not overestimat- 
ing our own importance, unless it be the correlative 
sin of personal vanity, which is envy. 

In the same category as this primary class are all 
those who have failed to gain recognition for a suc- 
cess which they imagine that they ought to have at- 
tained. 

Let me quote from a work of fiction, words that 
describe just what I mean: 

“He was the kind of a man who being first of all 
a disappointment to himself, had never forgiven him- 


WICKED LAMBS 125 


self for his failure, and was consequently disagree- 
able to everyone else in proportion to that person’s 
success.” 

The same human soul that will be arrogant over 
success will be bitter under adversity. The Kaiser 
in Prussia is identically the same person as the 
Kaiser in Holland! 

The difference is not in the soul of the man, but 
in the accident of his environment. 

Just as Napoleon showed the smallness of his 
greatness in the retreat from Moscow. 

In all times of our adversity as well as in all times 
of our prosperity, may the good Lord deliver us from 
playing the fool. 

There are two ways by which the unscrupulous 
spiritual adventurer can play upon human nature. 
The one is to ingratiate himself by flattering the van- 
ity of the successful; and the other is to proclaim 
to the man who pities himself the wrongs which he 
fancies that he endures. 

This is the stock in trade of the professional dem- 
agogue, and inasmuch as most people are discon- 
tented with their lot and envious of others, he readily 
gains a large and sympathetic audience. 

Many large and influential political and religious 
sects are built upon the emotional appeal to the 
wrongs of their hearers and the vices of those who 
are absent. 

The next streak in human nature which unfits men 
from a rigid evaluation of themselves is anger. 

An angry man is temporarily insane. I know be- 


126 CUSHIONED PEWS 


cause I have been angry, and I never was angry in 
my life when I didn’t play the fool. | 

It makes no difference whether the anger is a 
sudden flare or a brooding, sullen flame, it accom- 
plishes the same result—it warps a man’s judgment 
of himself, so that he is incapable of reason. 

A priest who loses his temper, scolds his people, 
grumbles at his fate, must either seek another par- 
ish or see the one that he shepherds fall to pieces. 

The layman who is constantly taking offense at 
this or resenting that is a poor soldier of Christ and 
will end by losing his faith in order to propitiate his 
idol. 

Whole parishes have been ruined and the joy of 
service has been impaired because there are two or 
three madmen in the congregation. 

Greed is perhaps the most prolific of those vices 
which make a truly spiritual life impossible, for one 
cannot serve two masters, his own selfish interest 
and God’s will. 

It is the most difficult vice for a man to recognize 
in himself, for the meanness becomes so much a part 
of one’s self that it is almost impossible for the man 
to distinguish between the me and the meanness. 

But in all instances it is the same. When a man 
refuses to acknowledge his fault, but rather excuses 
it or condones it, he becomes incapable of receiving 
the truth. 

It is then true, as Christ said so strangely and yet 
so accurately, ‘‘Because I tell you the truth therefore 
vou will not believe me.” 

A perverted mind which refuses to discipline itself 


WICKED LAMBS 127 


becomes the victim of perverted prophets, just be- 
cause it refuses to think straight, to be honest with 
itself and prefers the comfortable lie to the unwel- 
come truth. 

Man’s first conquest must be the accurate inven- 
tory of his own liabilities. Unless he is willing to do 
this he will end in moral and spiritual bankruptcy. 





PART III 


THE CHURCH 





Your Light 


HE grace of God is like an electric current by 

which your home is lighted and your work is 

accomplished. There are four’ essential 
things in an electric current. 

ist There is the dynamo that generates the elec- 
tricity. This may be far away from your home, but 
it is the source of light and heat by which your home 
is illuminated. 

2nd There is the wire by which the electricity is 
conducted to your home, so long as the current is 
unbroken. 

3rd There is outside of your home a transformer 
by which the current is adapted to the needs of the 
family. 

4th There is the bulb which gives out the light 
or the plate which sends forth heat. 

If you turn on the button and one of the bulbs 
fails to give out light, you do not imagine that there 
is no dynamo, nor that the wire is not transmitting 
the current, nor even that your transformer is out 
of order. There are other bulbs that are shining and 
so long as any light shines in the room you know 
that the trouble lies in the particular bulb or bulbs 
which fail to shine. 

And yet how many foolish folk have said that 
there was no God or that the Church was a failure 
or that the parish was dead just because some one 
Christian from whom they had expected light or 
heat gave forth darkness or was cold to the touch. 


131 


132 CUSHIONED PEWS 


For God sending His Holy Spirit in the Day of 
Pentecost is the dynamo, who sends forth His light 
and His truth into a dark place. 

And the Holy Catholic Church has been the wire 
that has brought down the grace of our Lord Jesus 
Christ through all the centuries without a break in 
the current. And the Parish Church is the trans- 
former which breaks up the grace of God for your 
own particular needs. } 

And you and your neighbors are the bulbs which 
send forth light, provided they have made the con- 
nection and are intact within. 

Of course you can not give the grace of Christ to 
others if you are not connected with Him in the way 
that He has prescribed. Those who have been bap- 
tized into Christ have put on Christ, and those who 
are in true communion with Christ dwell in Him 
and He in them. 

But each bulb gives light or darkness if it is con- 
nected with Christ and intact within its own soul. 

The conscience is like the very fine wire in the 
bulb. It must have a single purpose. It must not 
be broken so that it lacks singleness of purpose. 

And after all when we fail to shed light into the 
darkness around us the fault is not elsewhere, it is 
within us, for many other bulbs have kept shining 
under more difficult circumstances than those 
which beset us. It is silly to blame God or the 
Church or the parish for our refusal to keep our 
touch with Christ or our unwillingness to keep our 
motives pure. 

No one who really wants to shed forth the light of 


YOUR LIGHT 183 


the Gospel into an evil world can possibly have any 
other alibi than one of these two things. Either they 
have deliberately broken their connection with 
Christ, or else they have broken the slender thread 
of their own conscientious action. 


All this refusal to observe these simple rules for 
being an instrument of light is silly in the light of 
the fact that Christ offers to infuse into your life the 
grace that you really seek. 


Of course there are parishes which do not seem to 
be very good transformers. Perhaps you need a new 
plug somewhere. A conceited or opinionated priest; 
a worldly or infallible warden; a secular or lazy 
vestry; a guild of malicious busybodies; a dull or 
slovenly Sunday School may affect to a certain de- 
gree the lighting capacity of your parish; and in the 
course of time it may be possible to remove the car- 
bonized plugs; but do not be over-anxious so long as 
some of the connections are possible. It is your bus- 
iness to let your light shine, not to reorganize the 
parish. If you will give the same anxious effort to 
establish your connection that you are apt to do in 
reforming someone else, you will help to keep the 
light shining in a dark place during a dark period. 


How many of our parishes have been kept going 
through long and dreary periods of gloom, by the 
persistence of a few people who have never allowed 
these faulty plugs to sever their connection with 
Jgesus Christ, and, I believe that He knows full well 
who they are and appreciates fully the service they 
have rendered. 


134 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Let me sum up this short chapter, by reaffirming 
certain principles of the Christian lighting system. 

Christ is the source of grace. 

His Church is the line of communication with 
Him. 

Our parish is the instrument by which His grace 
is adapted to our need. 

We are responsible for keeping the connection 
and preserving the integrity of our service. 

May I say a word about those who do not try to 
make a connection themselves but who criticize those 
who do. 

He has a little one-power candle which he uses to 
guide himself through a dark house, while he faults 
the darkness which surrounds him. 

If you want to live in a light, cheery house, then 
make your connection with the light of the world 
and stop mumbling about the fact that you are con- 
cdemned to walk in darkness. 

For no man can give light who doesn’t receive it, 
and criticizing darkness is not giving light by a good 
deal. 

Only as men realize that Christ is the dynamo, can 
the world be filled with light. 


One Thing Needful 


4 es GREATEST disappointment in Church 
life today is not, in my judgment, the theo- 
logical difficulties which receive so much 
attention in certain quarters; nor is it in any great 
moral obliquities on the part of those who belong to 
the Church. The disappointment lies in the absence 
of friendliness in our parishes. 

Whenever one tries to emphasize this quality in 
parish life, one is at once cognizant of certain cross- 
sections of parochial life that seem to prohibit any 
real unity of spirit in Christian warfare. 

In the army these cross-sections were temporarily 
obliterated and the son of the toughest citizen was 
often the buddy of the scion of the most illustrious 
family. 

The taboos of caste life were forgotten in the com- 
mon denominator of the khaki uniform, and the 
exigencies of war. 

But somehow the cause for which Christ and the 
martyrs gave their life-blood, does not seem to be a 

_real enough warfare, so that “the rich and the poor 
must work together and the Lord is the maker of 
them all.” 

I am conscious wherever I go that there is a false 
emphasis in the household of faith in which the fel- 
lowship of the spirit is sanctified to other ideals, and 
the one great objective of the Master is set aside for 
other considerations. 

The Church as it exists, so often consists of little 


135 


136 CUSHIONED PEWS 


coteries of the best families; or such strata of the 
earth’s social soil as contain pay dirt. 

Too often the only point of contact is that of the 
Church treasurer, an annual visit of the pastor, and — 
an urgent invitation to attend a sale at the parish 
house. 

As an institution in which all are members one 
as another, such contacts are neither refreshing nor 
inspiring. 

Excellent people, who crave a few warm friends 
and a circle of intimate mutual understanding, find 
themselves outside of a rigid caste, formed by a few 
best families who have long enjoyed mutual fellow- 
ship one with another and so use the Church as an 
opportunity for social enjoyment, perfectly satisfac- 
tory to themselves; absolutely unpenetrative to 
anyone else; and very limited in its kindliness or 
enthusiasm. 

There is no more delightful atmosphere than that 
which is created by a limited number of selected 
families who know and practice the ritual of good 
society and enjoy the mutual confidence and respect 
of one another. One cannot fault their taste, but one 
may doubt that they are fulfilling the purpose of 
their Master in seeking their own personal comfort 
instead of paying more attention to ‘“‘the least of 
these their brethren.” 

These excellent groups of exceilent Church people 
form one of the most difficult cross-sections in 
parochial life. 

They are so nice to one another, that one “looks 
at heaven and longs to enter in;” but they are so 


ONE THING NEEDFUL 137 


frigidly distant to anyone who violates their ritual 
code or fails to respect their peculiar excellence that 
one goes away humming “From Greenland’s Icy 
Mountains.” 

It has been demonstrated time and again that no 
one can break into communion with these saints; 
therefore one waits with eagerness for the time to 
come when they themselves will awake to the fact 
that there is nothing in common with their little 
caste and the fellowship of Christ. 

If it is true that these groups regard themselves as 
the most gracious Christians in God’s world, then 
they need to learn that the Church of the Nazarene is 
not a bottling works, and grace was meant to flow 
out of gracious people to the least of these their 
brethren, and never be bottled for home consumption 
merely. 

Unfortunately for the effectiveness of the Church’s 
work, there are so often in these groups of really 
conscientious, cultivated Christians, a few equally 
charming people who are thoroughly worldly; who 
seem to be able to resist the call of the parson, charm 
he ever so wisely, and who dominate the rest. In 
other words, the really spiritually-minded parson 
runs into a cross-section of social caste, which holds 
together by stronger centripetal motives, than any 
centrifugal efforts of Christian grace can overcome. 

The Church automatically ceases to become a 
refuge for sinners (except such sinners as wear the 
livery of eminent respectability) and become a hot- 
house for the propagation of rare orchids and costly 
poinsettas. 


138 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Surely Christ never intended that and I am afraid 
will not appreciate it. 

There is a joyousness of life in expansion; in 
strength that assists weakness and confers blessings. 

There is stagnation and paralysis in the caste idea; 
and not only do those without get no real benefit 
from those within, but the possessors of these good 
things stultify themselves by their failure to com- 
municate their strength. 

The Religion of Jesus Christ brought together all 
sorts and conditions of people, who formed a brother- 
hood in which their common Jove and common life 
proved a power for good in a world of caste. 

There is something in the caste idea that is hateful 
to God’s benevolence, and there is something in the 
perpetuation of caste that is fatal to those who rest 
in its anasthesia. 

It is a powerful opiate and those who indulge see 
beautiful visions and produce ghastly results. 

The idea of fellowship,—real, genuine brother- 
hood, is basic in the gospel of Christ and it is that 
phase of religion that is most difficult to realize and 
most rare in its achievement. 

The fellowship of Christ involves all sorts and 
conditions of people, rich and poor, wise and simple, 
employer and employe, master and servant who do 
not allow their earthly differences to mar the unity 
of their spiritual fellowship. 

It is a communion in which the poor are not proud, 
and the rich are not patronizing, but in which every 
element of society realizes that each is one ingredi- 
ent only of a common whole; and that God is endeav- 


ONE THING NEEDFUL 139 


oring to blend the diversity of human life into a 
unity of human fellowship — so that the diversity is 
not lost and the unity is something real. 

To accomplish this result it is not the poor and 
ignorant who need to be converted to the program, 
but rather it is the cultivated Christian who needs 
to be converted to the program of Christ. 

The hope for a new order must come from those 
who are the best of the old order and they must 
make the sacrifice which will win the support of the 
numble and the meek. 

Our own Church people must eventually learn to 
love the person that they do not like and do the thing 
that they do not want to do as good soldiers of Jesus 
Christ. 

We have too many nice people in the Church who 
pray to God with reservations. “‘O Lord what wilt 
thou have me to do that I want to do already” is the 
real petition that many soldiers of Christ use to lull 
their own consciousness to sleep, for God never hears 
them. 


Our Task 


HE Hebrew religion divided the world into 

two classes, those who were keepers of the law 

and those who were open violators of the law. 

The Pharisees prided themselves upon their right- 

eousness and despised all others. The sinners broke 
the law and acknowledged that they were sinners. 

The law brought nobody to real righteousness, be- 
cause those who kept the law were hard and merci- 
less. 3 

Christ made a new division of human nature. ies 

He lived His life and taught His Gospel. Those 
who loved Him because He was the beloved, and those 
who rejected Him because they were incapable of 
loving Him; was the division He made. 

This new division ignored the old one. In the 
ranks of His disciples were both Pharisees and sin- 
ners. Among the opposition also, both of these could 
be found. 

He set a new standard of dividing the sheep from 
the goats, but men were so attached to the old stand- 
ards that they refused to accept the new. 

We call ourselves Christians, but we still adhere 
to the old Hebraic standards. We still divide the 
elect from the outcasts along the same conventional 
legal standards and call it Christianity. It isn’t 
Christianity, but a revival of Hebraism. 

We still keep up the old Pharisaic standards of 
legal righteousness. We ignore, as Christ did not, 
the limitations of heredity, temperament and envir- 


140 


OUR TASK 141 


onment, classing men as respectable or disreputable, 
as they adhere to conventional standards or reject 
them. It is as unscientific as it is unchristian. 

It is the real miracle of Christ’s humanity that He 
should have anticipated the discoveries of modern 
psychology by two thousand years. Truly He knew 
what was in man far better than we know today. He 
knew, for example, that many sinners had never had 
a chance to be anything else but sinners and there- 
fore He was keen to give them a chance to be right- 
eous. But it was a different kind of a chance. They 
were to become righteous because they knew Him 
and loved Him. He could forgive their sins for He 
knew why they were sinners. 

The woman who was a sinner loved Him on sight, 
and because she loved much He could forgive much. 
The thief on the cross had never had a chance. Whex 
the chance of loving Christ was given him, he loved 
Him on sight, and because he loved Him, Christ of- 
fered to admit him into paradise. 

This is good psychology and therefore good re- 
ligion. 

Because of our weakness we put sinners in peniten- 
tiaries, which is a necessity; but then we forget 
them and leave them to the tender mercies of mer- 
cenaries, not bothering about the future of the sin- 
ner, but thinking only of the safety of the public. 

To herd sinful men together in dull barracks, un- 
der brutal guards, without any concern about their 
spiritual needs is to miss our opportunity to reach 
the sinner who is capable of loving much. The prac- 
tice is as stupid as it is disastrous, because it will 


142 CUSHIONED PEWS 


make a hardened sinner out of a good man and will 
never make good men out of sinners. 

We observe the same principle in running our 
churches. We ignore the practice of Christ, who is 
our Master, and accept the standards of the world 
which is our enemy. 

The churches are run for the spiritual enlighten- 
ment of the conventional good and without much con- 
cern for the needs of the potential good, who are de- 
barred by the standards of conventional righteous- 
ness which we set up. 

And this is the weakness of the Church and not 
its strength. 

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes this, and 
in spite of the fact that she is guilty of legalism from 
another angle, she is not stupid enough to run her 
churches for Pharisees (even though many of them 
are good Pharisees), but for sinners. 

And she does this, not because her priests are more 
tender than our clergy, but merely because she is 
strong in Church tradition, and has held tenaciously 
to this tradition—that the Church is for sinners, and 
so she is strong while we, who can outmatch her in 
the number of influential laymen, cannot match her 
in the power of humanitarian endeavor. 

We have boxed up the Church by substituting the 
traditions of men for the commandments of Christ. 
We have accepted the conventional standards of the 
world for the more difficult standards of Christ. 

It is tragic to consider the worldly influence of the 
millions that belong to us, with the spiritual influ- 
ence that they exert as churchmen. 


OUR TASK 148 


In the social, financial and political world we can 
set the pace, but in the spiritual world we apologize 
for our existence. 

We suffer the torments of men who have fine con- 
victions, but lack the courage to put them into prac- 
tice. 

Theoretically, the bulk of our people believe that 
which I have said, but practically they accept the 
traditions of our immediate ancestors. 

As one looks at our practice one is convinced that 
we have both the traditions of the Master and the 
freedom of the sons of God, but we lack the spiritual 
courage to practice that which our formularies pro- 
claim. Some day we will, and then I would like to 
be alive. 

Some day our modernist knights, instead of using 
up their splendid talents in tilting at windmills, will 
direct their lances at the real Apollyon. 

It is futile to attempt to clean up the principalities 
of this world until we have purified the force that 
can ultimately accomplish it. 

It is puerile to use up energy in restating academic 
creeds in order that we may admit into our gates 
more influential laymen of the same apologetic type 
as those which we possess already. 

What we who are thought to be radicals of various 
kinds ought to do is to combine in the effort to restate 
not our intellectual, but our moral standards of 
Church membership. What we need is not a patched- 
up Church unity of modern Pharisaism, but a practi- 
cal demonstration that Christ’s standards of Church 
membership are our standards, and that in the house 


144 CUSHIONED PEWS 


of God, the rich and the poor do meet together and 
the Lord is the maker of them all. 

We need to get rid of, even at some financial loss, 
those who neither go into the gates of Heaven them- 
selves, nor permit others to enter. We need a con- 
stituency which believes and practices the example 
of Christ and which does not father the Church by 
wrapping it in grave clothes of cultural respectability 
and academic hair-splitting. 

We need to stop talking finance, even if we close 
up a lot of mendicant missions, and to live the gospe! 
as it is in Christ and not as it is in respectable but 
thoroughly Hebraic vestries, who are far more con- 
cerned with “How much?” than they are concerned 
with “the least of these our brethren.” 

Let us stop talking platitudes and practice Christi- 
anity at whatever cost to the public treasury. 


Do not misunderstand me. The Roman Catholic 
Church has substituted Hebraic discipline for the 
freedom of Christ. The Protestant world is frankly 
legalistic and hopelessly disorganized. The Church 
has both freedom and the organization to make her- 
self the medium of Christ’s ideals. This does not 
mean that she will be popular, financially strong or 
socially influential. 

It means merely that by this means, and this 
means only, she can win the approval of her dear 
Master, and after all, what else matters in this 
inconsequential world? 


Enthusiasms Without Piety 


[ HAS been well said that the Christian Church 
| is more unpopular because of the virtues which 

Christ demands of it, than because of the faults 
which the Church manifests. It is not because Chris- 
tians are hypocrites than men side-step the obliga- 
tions of the Church, but it is because men are not 
willing to lose their moral license in serving Christ. 
They fear that Christ is a hard master and that if 
they serve Him, He will require of them certain’ 
sacrifices which will deprive them of the liberty that 
they now enjoy. 

They are like confirmed bachelors, who are willing 
to concede that married men have more happiness 
as they grow older, but insist that single men have 
more freedom, whereas any one, who makes a study 
of solitary men, knows that, as they grow older, they 
have no freedom at all and are the slaves of their 
own crochets, and perfectly miserable unless they 
can have things just as they are accustomed to have 
them. 

It was the promise of Christ that those who served 
Him should have perfect freedom and we are told 
that the end of the Christian life is that we may 
enjoy the glorious liberty of the Sons of God. 

What then is liberty? Is it doing just as we please 
or is it diciplining ourselves so that we please to do 
those things which make for liberty? 

“Whose service is perfect freedom,” seems to be 
a contradiction of terms to the irresponsible youth 


145 


146 CUSHIONED PEWS 


who confidently expects that in order to have a good 
time one must always have one’s way about every- 
thing. 

It is because of this almost universal fallacy that 
educational institutions are little more than juvenile 
country clubs in which temporary amusement has 
crowded out the adequate mental training; and fur- 
thermore that American Christianity tries rather to 
please the people than to train a people who are 
pleasing to God. 

And the product of American colleges and churches 
is best described in the words of the prophet as a 
“eake not turned,” half baked, cooked on one side, 
and dough on the other, with no cohesion to hold it 
together, messy. 

Men want freedom without training themselves to 
be free, whereas liberty is a condition of spiritual 
poise which takes more training to acquire than any 
other quality which man seeks. Men turn impa- 
tiently from training in order to be free, whereas 
they grow up merely uncontrolled. 

What do Americans mean when they say that the 
Philippines are incapable of self-government, except 
this very thing, that they have never learned self- 
control? 

There is only one way in which to govern people 
who lack self control and that is by the iron hand of 
law, externally applied. 

And when this nation appeals, as it does, to legis- 
lative enactment for the control of citizens, it regis- 
ters its conviction that its people are incapable of 
self-control. 


ENTHUSIASMS WITHOUT PIETY 147 


Now Christ came to teach us self-control, not by 
the law but by the more gracious motive of human 
love; and when a man rejects Christ in the interests 
of self-determination, he invariably demonstrates his 
inability to control himself, and ends by becoming the 
slave of self instead of becoming the servant of Him, 
whose service is perfect freedom; and where do you 
find this freedom apart from Christ? 

Human liberty did not exist on earth until Christ 
furnished the motive that produced it, and while 
tyrants have used the instruments which Christ fur- 
nished in order to keep men in subjection, yet we in 
America need not be afraid of such abuse, if we 
really want the liberty which Christ holds out to us. 

For the kingdom of Heaven is at hand, and, if men 
really want the treasures of that kingdom, there is 
nothing to prevent their taking it by force, for the 
Christian Church is a democracy which can be seized 
by those who want the blessedness which Christ 
gives. 

The reason why they do not want to seize the 
Church, is because they do not want the qualities 
which Christ practiced and taught. They prefer to 
substitute other movements in which enthusiasm can 
be evoked, without making any demand upon the 
individual to practice the piety which Christ 
demanded. 

Men do not want to forgive their enemies; they do 
not want to pray for those who despitefully use them ; 
they do not want to return good for evil; they do not 
want to seek the kingdom of God and His righteous- 
ness; and they neither believe in nor want “all those 


148 CUSHIONED PEWS 


things” which Christ promised “should be added unto 
them.” 

Oh yes! They want blessedness, but it is not the 
blessedness of spiritual victory. It is rather the 
blessedness of material prosperty which is sought 
alike by rich and poor; by the Wall Street bloc and 
the farmer bloc; by the standpatter and the socialist. 

They all demand universal justice but are unwill- 
ing to practice the individual godliness by which 
alone that universal justice can be attained. 

There has nothing occurred yet in the history of 
social welfare which makes me believe that there is 
any other way under Heaven by which men can at- 
tain to universal righteousness but “the way” which 
Christ walked, and that is the way of individually 
taking our cross and following Him as He walked. 
When men are willing to assume the discipline of the 
cross, they may hope to obtain the crown of glorious 
liberty, and in no other way. 

That is why I am not interested in the various en- 
thusiasms by which undisciplined souls are made to 
believe that they can obtain liberty and retain their 
unbridled license to hate and to envy and to cheat. 

It is as the Rev. Mr. Knox has said, “enthusiasm 
without piety,’’ and personal godliness is the only 
way in which glorious liberty can be acquired. 

The effort to obtain the result without Christ’s 
method is a travesty of justice and a perversion of 
liberty which invariably degenerates into chaos and 
tyranny. 

The Church is the one institution in the world to- 
day which is even making the effort to make men 


ENTHUSIASMS WITHOUT PIETY 149 


righteous, and the reason why the Church is so often 
perverted and so frequently despised, is not because 
- the Church is incapable of producing righteous men. 


~The few men whom I have known who are cheer- 
fully giving their lives to the service of their fellow 
men owe their inspiration for such service to Jesus 
Christ and to some influence that the Church in 
some form has had upon their lives. 


The difficulty is not with the function of the 
Church. The difficulty is that so few men are will- 
ing to abandon their personal selfishness, and to put 
on worship as a garment, and to endure hardness 
as good soldiers, in order to create an atmosphere in 
which liberty, righteousness and justice is even a 
remote possibility. 

Men despise the Church not because they are su- 
perior to its claims, but because they are unwilling 
1o make the individual sacrifice to endure the inevit- 
able discipline which Christ imposes on each dis- 
ciple. 

People hate the Church not because of its failure, 
but because of Christ’s demands through it, upon 
what they are pleased to call their personal liberty. 

Men do not want holiness; they want loot. 

Men do not want God over them; they want their 
own way. } 

Men do not want the beatitudes of Christ; they 
want the luxuries of Croesus, and so the Church is 
despised, not for what she is, but for what she tries 
to make men to be. 


Parson’s Wives 


T WOULD be an ideal condition if there were 
if enough young men, who had the dual vocation 

to be priests and celibates. But experience has 
taught mankind, that to enforce celibacy upon those 
who feel called to the ministry, is a dangerous plan 
for which society pays too great a price. 

This Church has wisely determined that marriage 
is a sacramental relationship and in no way inter- 
feres with a man’s priestly vocation. | 

It would be an ideal situation if we could train 
in similar seminaries, the young man who is going 
to be a priest, and the young woman who is going to 
be his wife; so that they could be equipped for the 
ordeal that awaits them, but this, unfortunately, is 
not practicable. | 

Young clergymen will insist upon selecting their 
Own wives much as young doctors and lawyers insist. 

Consequently clergymen’s wives come from all 
sorts and conditions of families—from the daughter 
of the leading banker in a great metropolis to the 
daughter of the village blacksmith in the young 
clergyman’s first cure. Why not? 

She may be a young lady of education and refine- 
ment or she may be a peasant girl of grace and 
beauty or she may be a very homely, unattractive 
female. How can it be otherwise? 

However, she has been married to her husband 
in a free country and according to the rites of re- — 
ligion. 
150 


PARSONS’ WIVES 151 


Now begins a very curious experience. Were she 
to have married a lawyer or a doctor, she would 
have grown up in one circle which she would have 
graced or otherwise, and would have gone to her 
reward surrounded by life-long friends. 

Not so with the minister’s wife. She, wittingly 
cr unwittingly, has entered upon a career for which 
she has had little or no preparation. 

Her husband, being a man of ideals, feels that he 
should begin his ministry in a hard place, so he 
cffers himself for the Mission field. 

The little Mission has a small congregation which 
at once assumes a proprietorship in the minister and 
all that pertains unto him. 

The wife senses the situation and learns to treat 
the feminine portion of the flock as one would treat 
6, group of relatives among whom she is destined to 
live. 

It is rather an informal relationship, for the vil- 
lage Church contains all sorts and conditions of folk 
and formal relations are hopeless. 

The matrons of the Mission assume the same 
rights over the rectory that they would toward any 
of their poor relations who were dependent upon 
them, and are kindly if sometimes officious. 

The other women act as an investigating commit- 
tee and comment rather severely upon any failures 
to conform to their rather impossible standard of 
what a rector’s wife should be. 

Perhaps, however, she adjusts herself to the situ- 
ation and keeps up a good appearance on a minimum 
salary and a maximum of hospitality. 


152 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Then comes a change. Her husband has been called 
to a rather good parish in a select neighborhood of 
cultivated and well-to-do people. In the goodness of 
their hearts they offer to pay the moving expenses. 

The young couple move into the handsome rectory 
with their meager furniture, healthy babies and a 
balance of thirty dollars in the bank. 

The scene shifts. The new parishioners are proud 
of their new rector’s abilities, and the couple are 
invited to formal dinners and are expected to attend 
social functions. In what’? The young wife is rather 
dismayed. What shall she do? Involve her husband 
heavily in debt or go in the clothes of her previous 
social requirements. 

Which should she do? The probabilities are that 
one will do one, and the other will do the other; and 
in either case the fiddler will have to be paid. | 

Christian women should be considerate and kindly 
folk, but, when the clergyman’s wife is concerned, 
they are apt to regard her as the scapegoat whom 
the Lord has provided for the sacrifice. So they get 
out their knives and their scissors. Poor woman! 
She is between two evils. If she chooses the one, her 
husband will be looked upon as one who does not pay 
his bills, and if she choose the other, she will be re- 
garded as a social liability for whom the select par- 
ishioners must apologize. 

The rector of one of our outstanding parishes told 
me that in each of three successive parishes his wife 
had been let alone for two years, until her sterling 
qualities commanded respect. 

First they had been received gladly; then they had 


PARSONS’ WIVES | 153 


been ignored socially; then they had been accepted 
willingly. 

Now these people were solid, substantial people, 
who felt that they would not pretend that for which 
they could not pay. Well, time goes on and promo- 
tion comes. This time to a large parish in a great 
city. The family wardrobe has been brought up to 
a modest standard, but from a select parish of two 
hundred people, they are now confronted by a com- 
municant list of 1,000, and in three months the rec- 
tor’s wife who has three or four children, one serv- 
ant and no automobile, is confronted with the fact 
that there are four hundred visiting cards in the 
card basket. These calls she is told must be returned. 
Heaven help her. 


Did you ever try to make four hundred calls in 
one season? That would be thirty calls a week for 
fourteen consecutive weeks. 


And what happens’? Of course it cannot be done. 


Do considerate parishioners send around a ma- 
chine by which she can accomplish this miracle? 


Or if her husband owns a flivver, can he give up 
his work and drive his wife around? Or shall they 
make semi-parochial and semi-social calls together? 
Heaven forbid. 

Is she forgiven if she leaves out anybody in her 
daily ministrations? 

Here is the strange thing in a Christian congre- 
gation. The clergyman’s wife is not forgiven. 

I have known several instances when the minis- 
ter’s wife has been snubbed for years because of 


154 CUSHIONED PEWS 


some failure to observe social ritual or to exercise 
unusual diplomacy in a trying situation. 

One hesitates to carry this case to the supreme 
court and discourse upon the wives of bishops. It 
seems so personal and yet something needs to be 
said in a general way. 


Let us hope before our young rector has been 
elevated to the Episcopate, that he and his wife have 
become used to the unreasonable demands made 
upon them by their constituency. 


For now the clergyman and his wife must be sep- 
arated. It is true that it is not a legal separation 
but rather a practical one. 

He must leave his wife and children to the tender 
mercies of his constituents while he goes a-traveling. 

Now his constituency has grown to several thou- 
sands and the time when he is at home is reduced to 
an irreducible minimum. 

There are certain questions which arise in one’s 
mind as he is confronted with the problem of his 
social relations. 

Shall he become a member of a caste and identify 
himself with that most delightful group who play 
the game of life according to certain well-defined 
rules of compensation? It would be nice. 

Should a bishop consume the few days when he is 
at home in returning certain social obligations? 

Should his wife be expected to return all calls? 

At first instance one might say of course. 

But stop and think a moment. 

The President of the United States or the Goy- 


PARSONS’ WIVES 155 


ernor of a State are officers who are not expected 
to return calls. 

Why not? Because it is manifestly impossible. 
One would think that Christian courtesy would be 
as considerate as secular common sense. 

There is a parable of our Lord’s in which he deals 
with this matter of social compensations. 

“When thou makest a feast—call the poor and the 
maimed, the halt and the blind—for they cannot 
recompense thee.”’ 

Would that the clergy might be included in this 
group—as well in the obligations of society, as in 
the estimation of successful business men. 

If one is to observe all the rules laid down by all 
the groups, from whom he receives many courtesies, 
then let us inaugurate a new order of deacons and 
deaconesses to discharge these rules in order that 
the shepherds may give themselves to the word of 
God and to prayer. 

I do not think that Christian people are intention- 
ally malicious, but I do think that they are fre- 
quently very inconsiderate. 

Each family in a given city moves in a delightful 
circle of from five to fifty families, according to 
their taste and leisure. And as a rule it is very 
loathe to add to this list, until it becomes too for- 
midable. “I have all the friends that I can carry 
now,” said one fine woman to me when I asked her 
to cultivate a lonely woman. And she was right in 
her way. 

But a pastor has from fifty to a thousand families 
who are equally in the circle of his friendship. 


156 CUSHIONED PEWS 


What is he to do? Repay all social obligations, or 
shut himself up with a delightful circle of intimate 
friends? 

I wonder how much of the frequent unpopularity 
of bishops in their own dioceses is due to the fact 
that people are demanding from them, the obsery- 
ance of the same rule as that which governs a pri 
vate citizen who can limit his clientele to his strength 
and ability. 

Most of these bishops have been very popular as 
rectors, and many of them would gladly return to 
the genial atmosphere of their old parishes if they 
could. 

Usually their wives had adapted themselves to the 
hospitable friends whom they have left, they come 
to a strange city and find themselves in a different 
surrounding. 

They want to be natural and they are expected to 
be conventional; or they want to be conventional and 
are expected to be natural; for they no longer are in 
touch with a mere parochial set, but with all sorts 
and conditions who have an equal claim upon them. 


Let me close with a few elementary rules: 


(1) Take it for granted that the clergyman’s wife 
is a Christian lady living in a free land, entitled to 
her own peculiarities and limited by the family in- 
come. 


(2) Do not expect the wives of clerics to observe 
those social obligations (which you yourselves limit 
severely to a particular set) which they cannot limit 
in fairness to all. 


PARSONS’ WIVES 157 


They ought not be expected to repay calls or to 
return the lavish entertainment which they receive, 
if for no other reason, because of the large number 
of those to whom they are obligated and the small 
income that they have to dispense. 

The hospitality of the clergy should be for the 
poor and not “for those who can recompense them 
again.” 

(3) Do not fault a priest or his wife if they either 
are ignorant of, or unwilling to give the time and 
attention to, the requirements of society which are 
expensive in time or money. 

If you give your rector a generous salary, do not 
expect to have him give it back to you in expensive 
entertainment, but rather encourage him to spend 
it on the poor, for this is Christian, and will have a 
bearing upon his spiritual influence. 

(4) Do not hold a clergyman or his wife respon- 
sible for social calls in return for yours. 

Of course ‘a clergyman might pick out the import- 
ant people to recognize, but, if he did, he would be 
neglecting those who have a better claim upon his 
time and generosity, and would not be following 
His Master. 

It is very hard for a pastor to live up to what the 
world expects of him. He and his wife are conscien- 
tious people, and if you would be helpful to his min- 
istry, be kindly to his wife and her limitations, for, 
after all, they are the same as your own. 


A Gentleman’s Game 


OLF is a gentleman’s game for, in golf, each 

e€ man is trusted to keep his own score, is not 

watched as to whether he keeps the rules, 

and is so fuil of provocations from start to finish 

that it tests all one’s reserve powers to self-control 
to keep smiling. 

Of course the demon of commercialism invades the 
golf course as it invades the sacred relations of host 
and guest in the home, and as it invades religion. 
Those who must introduce a monetary consideration 
into friendly games pay the penalty of turning recre- 
ation into a business. 

Playing a game for money or things is an abomin- 
ation of social intercourse. | 

We cannot let the mammon of unrighteousness 
alone, not even in our sports or in our homes. There 
ought to be an inviolate custom that the man who in- 
troduces monetary considerations into the games of 
friendship, should be sentenced to hard labor in a 
bank until he becomes sick of the sight of money. 

But golf in itself is pure from this offense. And 
the man who commercializes the game becomes a 
professional, that is, he makes it a business. 

Why a professional is debarred from amateur con- 
tests because he makes a living by it, and the man 
who plays for a stake is not so debarred I do not 
know. Seems to me the latter does more to ruin the 
game than the former. 

I like to think of religion as a gentleman’s game 


158 


A GENTLEMAN’S GAME 159 


rather than to think of it as a business. St. Paul 
thinks of it in both relationships. He talks religion 
in the language of the arena. 

“So fight I not as one that beateth the air,” 

“So run that ye may obtain,” 

“Let us press toward the goal for the prize.” 

He also speaks of religion as a vocation or as a 
business, but perhaps in his day business had not de- 
veloped into such a hard mechanical process as it is 
today. 

At any rate I prefer to think of religion as a gen- 
tleman’s game in which God prefers us to keep our 
own score without being watched; and in which God 
Jets us play our ball in accordance with our own con- 
science; and in which God expects us to be cheerful 
in whatever trouble we may find ourselves. After 
all, that is the sportsmanlike way to play the game of 
life. 

Now keeping one’s own score is simply a matter 
of truthfulness. It is the one, two, three of golf 
and of life. 

There are players whose wish is father to the 
thought, and who persist in forgetting some bad 
strokes in order to make it appear that they have 
played the game more correctly than they have. 

It is rather hard to be truthful with one’s self. 
“To thine own self he true” is easier said than done. 

To keep the truthful score of all the dub shots that 
we make in life and to confess them willingly is not 
easy. We prefer to do like a certain player who was 
playing recently in a contest and whose stroke was 
so bad as he neared the end that he tore up the score 


160 CUSHIONED PEWS 


card rather than be humiliated by the miserable score 
that he had made. 

So many people in life either do not keep score, or 
as they near the end of life, they petulantly tear up 
their score card. 

The game of life demands truthfulness without 
evasion and without deception. 

After all life is a gentleman’s game in which a 
good conscience is better than a fine score. For the 
man who gets a poor score gets aS much exercise 
and nearly as much real benefit as the man who plays 
in par. And as we play golf for exercise rather than 
the score, so we play the game of life for the train- 
ing of the soul rather than for its record. A part 
of that training is that a man shall learn to be strictly 
honest with himself and as courteously lenient to the 
other player as the rules of the game will permit. 

The game of life has its rules. The Ten Com- 
mandments of Moses, including the worship of God 
and purity toward your neighbor’s wife as well as 
vour own. The two greater commandments that we 
love God and love our neighbor so that we need not 
think of printed rules as we play, because we have 
caught the spirit of the game and so have learned 
its rules. 

The Commandments of the Christ: “Repent ye!” 
“Do this!” “Go ye!” and all that obedience involves. 

It is a gentleman’s game and so we accept the rules 
and do not attempt to manufacture rules to suit our- 
selves. 

Neither when our ball has a bad lie, do we attempt 
to change the rules to suit our ball, neither do we 


A GENTLEMAN’S GAME 161 


move the ball with our toe in order that we may 
make a better score. We may be in the bunker of 
sickness, or poverty, or injustice. We may be con- 
fronted with the hazard of suspicion or misunder- 
standing or contempt. We may find ourselves well 
off the fair-way in the rough of circumstances or 
accident or design. 

All right! There are rules which the Master has 
laid down for human conduct and we do not seek to 
reshape religion to suit our unfortunate lie, but on the 
contrary we play the ball as best we can. Undoubt- 
edly you are in difficulty. Most of us are from time 
to time. 

What are you going to do about it? There is but 
one thing to do, and that is to play the game accord- 
ing to the rules. 

Perhaps you have made an unfortunate marriage, 
have become involved with a disagreeable partner, 
find yourself in an unpleasant parochial atmosphere, 
or in uncomfortable social relations. What about it? 
So many think that they have solved the difficulty 
by picking up their ball and going home. 

America is becoming a nation of moral cowards, 
as Mr. Emerson Hough has publicly said, because 
Americans fancy that they can ignore the rules which 
Christ has laid down for the game of life. Play your 
ball where it lies and face the issue at no matter 
what cost to yourself. 

The cowardly whine which sends people to the di- 
vorce court and keeps them away from church for 
petty reasons, or causes them to found a new religion 
because they fancy the old religion does not fit their 


1.62 CUSHIONED PEWS 


particular case is not the way in which the game of 
life will be won. 

Life, like golf, is purposely made hard. It may 
seem silly to some people that men build bunkers and 
hazards on golf courses in order to make the game 
more difficult, but it is only a difficult game that 
provokes an adventurous spirit and makes the game 
worth playing. 

There are religions today which claim to smooth 
out all the hazards in life. When they have suc- 
ceeded in doing so, life will become a mere bovine 
existence. 

Every difficulty, every obstacle in life is a chal- 
lange to sportsmanship. 

Every time we pick up our ball because of the chal- 
lenge, we join the ranks of quitters. Provocations 
are the order of the day, but the seasoned player does 
not lose his temper and complain of fate because life 
is provoking. Rather, he selects the club which will 
best meet the difficulty and plays as best he can, 
more concerned that he be a sportsman than about 
the score. 

Golf has been facetiously described as the game 
of putting a small ball into a small hole with instru- 
ments very ill adapted to the purpose. } 

This isn’t a bad definition of life. The small ball 
is myself and the small hole is the place that I am to 
occupy in life and the instruments are such as God 
has devised. 

Nor am I so much concerned about the score as I 
am about the sportsmanlike way in which I handle 
those instruments. 


A GENTLEMAN’S GAME 163 


I wish more people would look at life as a gentle- 
man’s game rather than as a hectic performance in 
which they sit on the bleachers and criticize the little 
group who are trying to play the game. It is all 
right to help from the gallery on certain occasions, 
but to sit in the bleachers is not exercise, nor does it 
seem quite fair that those who are experiencing none 
of the difficulties should furnish so much of the crit- 
icism. And I believe that all such will pay the pen- 
alty of their officiousness. 


Entangling Alliances 


HE Christian religion has been the most pow- 

erful force in leavening human society. But 

the grace of God, working through Christ and 

His Church, has not always been equally potent in 

its effect on society. This influence has been carried 

en through various instruments, in which human 

personality and external machinery have been im- 

portant factors in determining the power of.God in © 
human affairs. 

Under certain conditions the Church has been 
powerful for good; under other conditions it has 
seemed to co-operate with the world, the flesh and 
the Devil to injure the work that it has done. 

This is not remarkable because all powerful forces 
when misapplied are as injurious as they are benefi- 
cial when rightly handled. 

There is no more beneficient force than elec- 
tricity, but if you handle it in the wrong way you will 
be electrocuted instead of being illuminated. 


The very speed by which a railroad train carries 
you to your destination will be a contributing force 
to your destruction if the train leaves the rails. 

I believe that the same thing is true of religion, 
and I believe that the Master pointed out this fact 
most clearly. 

He discriminated courageously between a wrong 
religion and a right religion. If your righteousness 
was that of the Scribes and Pharisees it wouldn’t 
take you where you hoped to go. 


164 


ENTANGLING ALLIANCES 165 


One of the embarrassing features of our modern 
situation is that any group of people who claim the 
stamp of Christian can be guilty of all that the Phar- 
iseess did, and yet be included, under our loose form 
of thinking, as a part of the Christian Church in 
good standing. 


The public, looking at the Federation of Churches 
as Christianity, will make its deductions from the 
worst, rather than the best representatives and ac- 
cuse the whole body of Christians of being sponsor 
for the tactics of an irresponsible group. And this 
situation is the more deplorable when you consider 
that there is no pettiness as small as religious petti- 
ness and no bitterness as mean as religious bitter- 
ness. 


The very fact that religion is a powerful force 
makes the distortion of religion the more destructive. 


We are so sentimentally attached to the idea of 
Christian courtesy that it is bad form even to point 
out Pharisaism, although it is as strongly entrenched 
today as it was in the days of the apostles. 


Our Lord did not hesitate to condemn it; St. Paul 
called it by its right name; where it exists today in 
our own Church we do not hesitate to condemn it; 
but because we have entered into an entente cordial 
with all sorts and kinds of religious bodies, we must 
not observe this flagrant perversion of Christ’s gos- 
pel in other religious bodies. 
- Moreover, there are religious bodies in this coun- 
try which play the game of inter-church relations in 
various sections of the country with an unfairness 


166 CUSHIONED PEWS 


which if practiced among pagans in a golf tourna- 
rent would debar them from the course forever. 

Again we are confronted with a situation in which 
the Church is prevented from protest by its entang- 
ling alliances. | 

The same persons who would vigorously protest 
against financial trickery and be sustained by the 
public do not dare protest at the most flagrant viola- 
tions of courtesy and fairness because the fact that 
they are done by a Christian denomination makes 
their acts sacrosanct. No matter how unfair the 
particular deceit; no matter how regardless of mor- 
als a Christian denomination may be, they can get 
away with it, because to speak of it would be a viola- 
tion of interdenominational courtesy. 

Any amount of official Pharisaism can go unre- 
buked under this allied banner which has been raised 
over all, and which shields alike the innocent and the 
cuilty. 

If there is one thing which was fought out by the 
apostles to a successful issue it was the battle against 
legalism. “The law came by Moses, but grace and 
truth came by Jesus Christ.” , 

And the law brought no one to perfection. Yet — 
the crusade of Pan-Protestantism today is one of 
securing civic righteousness by legislative enactment. 

For anyone to assert the fact that it is no part of 
the Christian gospel to appeal unto Caesar for legal 
process in making men righteous is to bring out a 
fusillade of malice, bitterness and all uncharitable- 
ness. 

I am not discussing the issue of law enforcement 


ENTANGLING ALLIANCES 167 


as a civic duty. I acknowledge it cheerfully. I 
merely assert that the ministers of Christ are not 
moral policemen, but rather are sent to win the sin- 
ner to Christ. And the whole tirade of Christian 
ministers against sinners of the flesh has no warrant 
in any language which Christ ever used in the prem- 
ises. 


It is most humiliating to feel that one is part and 
- parcel with a large group of ministers who set forth 
the moral value of a state legislature as overruling 
the law of Christ in the matter of marriage and di- 
vorce. It must cause one to repudiate any official 
identification with ecclesiastical organizations which 
wink at the enormity of this vice. 


I do not feel that there is any such theological gulf 
between myself and our allied Christians as to be 
impassable. Nor am I so much concerned with the 
matter of Apostolic Succession or some other kind 
which is non-apostolic. 

My difficulty in throwing myself into the popular 
current toward closer official affiliation with all sorts 
and conditions of Christians lies in the fact that I 
cannot accept the moral standards which they set 
forth as the Gospel of Christ. 


Nor is it that I feel any moral superiority. It is 
rather than our standards are different. Probably 
they would claim that theirs are better. But of one 
thing I am certain and that is that the Mosaic law 
cannot be a substitute for the grace of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, no matter how much it may be amended. 

It may be that they live up to their standards bet- 


168 CUSHIONED PEWS 


ter than I live up to mine. That is not the question 
either. The question is a deeper one. 

It is the old fight between a Pharisaic standard of 
Christian morals, however ideally it may be carried 
out, and the standards set by Christ, no matter how 
difficult they may be of realization. 

Christ did not scold drunkards or harlots, but won 
them by patient ministrations to their spiritual needs. 
Christ did not invoke either Caesar or the Sanhedrin 
to aid Him in putting over a moral crusade against 
the sins of the flesh. 

Christ did repudiate legalism and practiced kind- 
ness toward sinners. 

Personally, I believe that the moral ideals of the 
Church, however badly we may carry them out as 
individuals, are the ideals of the Master, and per- 
sonally I believe that the whole Christian population 
is deeply infected with a secularized Christ who ex- 
ists rather to make this world prosperous than it 
does to make sinners feel that they are sons of God. | 

From the days of the Protestant reformation the 
idea was lost and intellectual curiosity about God and 
spiritual things took the place of fellowship at a 
common altar. 

All this fussing about the creeds is due largely to 
the fact that we are more concerned with the intel- 
lectual side of religion than we are concerned with 
vutting on Christ in worship and service. We re- 
gard Christ too much as a teacher come from God; 
too little as the source of grace in the conquest of our 
own selfishness. 

We cannot form an alliance on ideas without losing 


ENTANGLING ALLIANCES 169 


the only true unity which is inseparable with the 
common baptism, common communion and common 
fellowship of the household of faith. 

The only kind of Christianity which will ever pro- 
foundly influence human society toward righteous- 
ness is one which manifests that rare combination of 
definite conviction and kindly courtesy. The two are 
not interchangeable, but complementary. 

Without definite convictions religion has no force; 
without Christian courtesy it has no attractiveness. 
One need not lack the latter because he possesses the 
Tormer. 


A Token of His Love 


T SEEMS a pity that theological controversy 

i should have raged around that which our Bless- 

ed Lord intended should be the center of friend- 
ship and the inspiration to Christian hospitality. — 

It does not speak well for us human-kind that we — 
guarrel chiefly over that which our Master intended 
should be the sacrament of fellowship. 

We must be a contentious, quarrelsome lot if we 
cannot live and let live in that which recalls to us 
that He died for us and that which reminds us that 
His greatest concern was that we should be one body 
with Him. 

I know that people blame “the Church” for the 
sins of the race, but I wonder if God will not judge 
us all, Churchmen and non-Churchmen alike, for our 
attitude toward the Church, just as I fancy He judged 
all men for their attitude toward His beloved Son. 

The Church is not a “person who is a sinner,” but 
we are sinners whether we misrepresent the Church 
to which we belong or censor the Church to which we 
do not belong. For Christ died for us and gave us the 
Church to be our bond of fellowship, and all are 
guilty who fail to measure up to His standard, 
whether we misrepresent the Church, reject it or 
abuse it. 

How keen we are to attach blame to someone else, 
when we ourselves are really not able to appreciate 
and use the instruments which the love of Christ has 
provided for us. 


170 


A TOKEN OF HIS LOVE 171 


Let us take the Lord’s Supper out of the sphere of 
‘theological controversy and look at it solely from the 
standpoint of affectionate loyalty. 

What did Jesus institute it for? 

What does it mean to you? 

What has it meant to me, who have received it 
nearly every Sunday for more than thirty years? 

Let us not try to solve the mystery, but rather let 
us understand the love behind it. 

It was the night of His betrayal, and, in the Jewish 
Calendar, the day of His passion. 

He loved His own dearly and proposed to leave 
them under the most harrowing circumstances. 

His intensely human love for His children promp- 
ted Him to establish with them a perpetual point of 
contact. 

Is not this exactly what we humans try to do when 
our loved ones leave us? 

We are not satisfied with the merely spiritual con- 
tact of memory or thought; we want some tangible 
contact with our own. 

When they are gone, we write to them, or wire 
them, or call them on long distance phone. 

We enjoy the kodak picture which they send us. 

We cherish their gifts for the remembrance that 
they involve. 

We welcome them with a kiss and an embrace 
when they return. 

It is not enough for human contact that we be sat- 
isfied with a mild platonic interest; we want a vivid 
physical touch, because we are human. 

Christ was intensely human. “‘The Word became 


172 CUSHIONED PEWS 


flesh and dwelt among us.” Neither did He seek to 
divest Himself of the physical by seeking the Nir- 
vana of abstract thought. 

As He went about among men, He touched those 
whom he loved and healed; He wept over the afflic- 
tions of those whom He loved; He broke bread with 
His intimate friends; He suffered Himself in the flesh 
and as He suffered was comforted by the one whom 
He loved, who leaned upon His breast. 

Why this attempt to dehumanize Christ? He did 
not deny nor evade the physical; He consecrated His 
body to pure acts of love. 

Think then of the Lord’s Supper not as a mysteri- 
cus something which you dread, but rather as a 
human something which His love provided for your 
need; which His voice bade you to observe; which 
His care for you provided as your comfort and solace. 

And if His graciousness awakens in you any ten- 
derness, any love, any desire, then tell me, how can 
His last request be a matter of cold indifference to | 
you unless you are incapable of responding to His 
love? 

God so loved you that He gave: Christ so loved 
you that He gave Himself; and as He gave Himself 
for you, He bade you, “Do this in memory of Me.” 
In doing this you give yourself in order to show 
forth His death until He come. 

Christ came, I am sure, not to satisfy the curiosity 
of intellectuals, but to meet the needs of a humble 
folk, for as His mother said: “He puts down the 
mighty from their seats and exalts the humble and 
the meek,” 


A TOKEN OF HIS LOVE 173 


It is a homely thing that Christ bids you sup with 
Him, but it is the most human thing in all the world. 

It is human contact with His own. 

Moreover, does it mean anything to you that for 
nineteen centuries, amid all of the selfishness, sensu- 
ality and cruelty of this wicked world, in all these 
centuries, little groups of faithful people, loving 
their Master, have continuously gathered on the first 
day of the week to break bread with Him. 

Would it have been the same; would love have per- 
sisted so continuously ; would men have held together 
so compactly in His fellowship; if these same souls 
had merely had a thought about God or an emotion 
concerning God or even a silent prayer to God? 

Was it not the fellowship of Christians in Christ 
at His altar that kept together the faithful in all the 
trials and tragedies of history? 

In short, can human beings who seek actual contact 
with their beloved, be satisfied in their contact with 
the human Christ, unless they are eager to make that 
particular contact to which His love has invited them 
—He bade us to do this. ; 

Does not the prayer of humble access express most 

beautifully the need of human affection when it says 
“Grant that we may so eat the flesh of Thy dear Son 
vesus Christ, and drink His blood, that our sinful 
bodies may be made clean by His body and our souls 
washed by His most precious blood and that we may 
evermore dwell in Him and He in us.” 

Would we care who else might kneel beside us, be 
he hypocrite or sinner, providing we may touch Him, 
if we really love Him as He loves us? 


Nae CUSHIONED PEWS 


Would he reject us because the man beside us was 
a brute? 

Why then are we so captious unless we seek an ex- 
cuse to withhold the devotion that His love invites? 

Do you not stay away because your love is cold? 

And it is just this touch that we need to have in 
America. Some physical contact which is not debas- 
ing. A pure love that is not stained with impure 
passion. 

He drew men to Him with the word of His mouth 
and the touch of His hand. 

Those who loved Him touched the hem of His gar- 
ment; washed His feet with tears and wiped them 
with hairs of the head; broke alabaster boxes of oint- 
ment on His body and He approved, because He knew 
that, even in the woman stained with lust, there was 
holy affection in the act. ‘“‘Because she loved much, 
she was forgiven much.” | 

How often have you learned to love those whom 
vou had not met before in the breaking of bread in 
vour own household? 

The Lord’s Supper is the sacrament of human 
affection, of Christian fellowship, of Christ’s hospi- 
tality. 

The large wafer consecrated by the priest has been 
well named the ‘‘Host,”’ because Christ is in truth a 
host in the Lord’s Supper. 

The season of greatest human hospitality has been 
well named from Christ’s Mass—Christmastide. 

“Why do you walk and are sad?” said the Master 
as the two disciples walked toward Emmaus. Well 
might He ask the same question of those today whose 


A TOKEN OF HIS LOVE 175 


lives are sad as they walk toward their destination. 

They told him then of their disappointment in 
their hopes of the Christ, ‘Whom they had trusted 
would redeem Israel.’”’ So men have turned away 
from a Christ whom they have never really under- 
stood, because they merely thought or talked about 
Him. 

“And it came to pass, as He sat at meat with them, 
He took bread and blessed it, and brake, and gave to 
them. And their eyes were opened and they knew 
Him, and He vanished out of their sight.” 


Gone was He, but they had seen Him and known 
Him, if only for the moment in the breaking of bread. 


*“‘And they said one to another, “Did not our hearts 
burn within us?” | 

It is just this intimate, instant touch that the 
Lord’s Supper provides for those who pled along the 
dreary way. 

It is just this, that the weekly reception of the 
Lord’s Supper has meant to me, as I look back on 
thirty years of service at the altar. 

Once a week, at least, I have dwelt in Him and He 
in me. 

What more is there in any embrace or in any inti- 
mate touch which we have with a friend? 

Just touch the hand or lips and we pass on, but the 
way is no longer dreary and one is no longer weary, 
for we have been with Him. 

Make the Lord’s Supper the time, the place, and 
the occasion when in the early morning you spend 
one-half hour with Christ. 


Rudeness to Christ 


Tie glory of the Gospel is that it reveals a 
personal God who, through His only begotten 
Son, calls us to be His children, and, except | 
we are willing to become as children in our relation- 
ship with Him, we cannot become members of His 
household. It should be the concern of parents that 
their children have good manners. 

It may not be altogether true that ‘““manners mak- 
eth man,” but it is unquestionably true that nothing 
differentiates the attractive from the unattractive 
child as good manners. God may love an ill-mannered 
child but He cannot admire him. 

Somebody has well said that our religion is the 
‘practice of the presence of God,’ so that our whole 
life is lived as though, “Thou God seest me” (at all 
times and under all circumstances) jbecomes the 
greatest factor in our daily life. 

It is this principle that lies at the basis of our 
Lord’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist. Of 
course He is present there, for He is always present 
wherever we are, and so He could not be absent at 
the time which He appointed for our worship and 
remembrance of His love. 

Surely no one who believes in God’s constant pres- 
ence in our lives could dare affirm that He absented 
Himself at this most sacred hour, but rather would 
be present in the most intimate and personal rela- 
tionship. 

Just as our earthly father might be present with 


176 


RUDENESS TO CHRIST A Ba 


us all day at the workshop, but would be more inti- 
mately present in a conference at which we might 
discuss affectionately matters of intensely personal 
concern. 

The Lord’s Supper is just such an intimately per- 
sonal relationship which Christ has established that 
“He might dwell in us and we in Him.” 

But mere intimacy without reverence and without 
good manners will in the end breed contempt. 

That is why so many ecclesiastics are rather hard- 
boiled in the matter of delicacy in manners toward 
God, and it is for the same reason that many cultured 
people have bad manners in Church. 

If Church is the place where we come in most inti- 
mate relationship to our Heavenly Father, then it is 
there that we ought to cultivate courtly manners, 
even more than in the drawing rooms of mere people 
who have little transitory importance. 

And so as we enter God’s House we should do so 
conscious that “the Lord is in His Holy Temple.” 

If we are really conscious of this we will not enter 
the Church late, for while being late on occasion may 
be a necessity, being late as a habit is certainly rude- 
ness. 

There are parishes in which half the congregation 
is habitually late. There is no apology for this but 
indifference and indolence, otherwise rudeness. 

As we enter God’s House we should enter it with 
the same consciousness of God’s honor as the rules 
of court procedure require that you approach the 
person of the earthly king who represents merely 
the majesty of his kingdom, 


178 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Easy familiarity with God in public worship is a 
sign that one is utterly lacking in appreciation of the 
wide difference in dignity between the creature and 
the Creator; the subject and the King; the Son and 
the Father of us all. 

The cheap familiarity that characterizes much 
public worship in America is responsible for the lack 
of reverence which is the great blot on juvenile char-— 
acter. . 

Where can there be any reverence if there is none 
in the House of God? 

Moreover in the communion service the Church 
has seen fit to require that one who proposes. to re- 
ceive shall confess his sins and be forgiven before 
he presumes to eat of that bread and drink of that 
cup. 

The easy familiarity with which people approach 
the sacrament, who have entered the Church after 
the absolution, is contrary not only to good manners 
but to personal humility. 

There is a lack of reality in the whole magnificent 
service if we thus minimize the vital importance of 
each vital act. 

In the same way the frequent habit of leaving the 
Church after the sermon, after the prayer for the 
Church Militant, or, having received, to leave before 
the thanksgiving or before the blessing, gives the 
same impression that would be given to your host, if 
after the meat course, you pushed back your chair, 
saying “I do not care for salad or dessert and so I 
am going home.” 

What are the extraordinary engagements that 


RUDENESS TO CHRIST 179 


cause people to hurry away from Church before the 
service is completed? We can sympathize with meek 
housewives who have husbands that are merely ali- 
mentary canals, surrounded by flesh; but the Ameri- 
can habit of escaping the blessing may be the cause 
why the lives of the unblessed are so lacking in 
blessing. 

It would seem as though God’s blessing was one 
of the chief things for which men ought to go to 
Church. To turn one’s back upon it without grave 
necessity and humble apology to God is an insinua- 
tion that His blessing is not worth waiting for. No- 
body could repeatedly do this thing without being 
rude to God. 

Of course there is a great company of independent 
thinkers who do not esteem these things as being of 
vital importance, but that is merely because they 
have an exaggerated sense of their own importance 
and a very imperfect idea of the tremendous signifi- 
cance of God’s presence in His sanctuary. 

To leave the service which our Lord instituted be- 
fore it is completed is to do as Judas did whose mind 
was so intent on the thirty pieces of silver that he 
forgot his manners. 

It is a poor precedent for Church people to follow. 

It is not only rude but it destroys the beauty of the 
service. 

Some clergy mangle the service by mumbling it 
and think that they are doing God service. Why any- 
one should think that an indistinct utterance confers 
distinction on the priest or gives glory to God is more 
than my poor brain has ever been able to fathom. 


180 CUSHIONED PEWS 


We are in Church to honor God, not to insult Him, 
for He is a person who in the person of His dear 
Son was most gracious to us. We can at least be 
gracious to Him. 

We do not do honor to Christ by murdering re 
service. 

But the laity can be guilty of equal rudeness, when 
in criticizing the habit of the clergy, they commit 
unspeakable rudeness in their mangling of the conti- 
nuity and beauty of the service by their original 
entrances and exits. 2 

Having been given the power of speech with which 
to glorify God, men stand like wooden images during 
the hymns and psalter, giving neither interest nor 
praise. 

Having been given a body which they decorate 
most elaborately and feed most bountifully, they re- 
fuse to offer their bodies to God in the posture of 
Christian convention, but substitute for it an atti- 
tude neither giving glory to God nor grace to their 
own bodies. 

Having been given much of this world’s goods 
they glorify God by giving Him as an offering on 
His altar about the same sum, sometimes not so 
much, as they bestow with princely largesse in tips 
upon their servants. What we need in worship is 
to visualize the reality of it all, that Christ has in- 
vited us to be His friends; that God has asked us 
to be His Sons; that we, each of us, should be joyous 
in conducting ourselves as a child of the King. 


PART IV 


THE CHRISTIAN YEAR 


ara, b) 





The Advent Call 


N Advent Sunday we hit the trail for another 
() year of Christian training. 

On the Sunday before Advent we pray God 
to “stir up the wills of faithful people’ that they may 
‘‘nlenteously bring forth the fruit of good works.” 

Stir up Sunday is a call for volunteers who will go 
into training for the vocation to which they .are 
called. 

There is something about training that is ex- 
tremely distasteful to those who put self-indulgence 
first and who do not care enough for the game to put 
themselves to the personal inconvenience of training. 

If St. Paul had seen a modern football team, 
trained to take any amount of gruelling punishment 
and trained further to go through the other line for 
substantial gains and the final touchdown, I have no 
doubt he would have had the same reaction as he had 
when he saw the athletic contests in the Corinthian 
arena. 

“T punish my body and keep it in subjection lest 
that by any means, when I have preached to others, 
I myself should be a castaway.” 

He would have seen in the football contest the 
effect of careful training. 

It is the well trained athlete who can execute the 
intricacies of a difficult play and see it through. 

It is the poorly trained athlete who has to be taken 
out of the game because he is completely exhausted. 

Football is largely a matter of careful training and 


183 


184 CUSHIONED PEWS 


no one can hope to play the game well unless he is 
willing to take the training. 


No amount of ability or strength can be effective 
until it has been trained to do its share in the team 
work which wins the victory, but as St. Paul says, 
“They do it to obtain a corruptible crown and we 
do it to obtain an incorruptible one.” 


The man who would win his victory over the forces 
of evil must first be willing to gain the victory over 
himself. 


The most apparent weakness of the American peo- 
ple is their futile confidence that they can win spir- 
itual victories without training. 

For this reason we are forever starting things 
which we do not finish. 

It is not at all difficult for the optimistic cheer 
leader to imagine victories and to plan campaigns on 
paper, but it is only when that optimism is backed 
by a well trained team that imagination can become 
reality. 

It is all right to hear inspirational leaders and they 
contribute mightily to the success of the team, but — 
when these same inspirational enthusiastic confer- 
ences and eloquent cheers are substitutes for con- 
scientious training and practiced plays, they miss the 
mark inevitably. 

It is an interesting but fatuous process to mark 
the successive laymen’s movements and interdeno- 
minational campaigns that have been started enthu- 
siastically by men of unusual personal force; then 
committed to local committees who meet and pass 


THE ADVENT CALL 185 


resolutions; and then entrusted to callow secretaries 
who persuade themselves that their cause is mighty 
by the extravagant way in which they spend money 
to further the same. 

Of course such a team never makes a touchdown, 
because the vagueness of the plans is exceeded only 
by the incapacity of the players. 

It is characteristic of American religious enthu- 
siasm that it wishes to grab the prize without press- 
ing toward the goal. 

The Episcopal Church is awfully slow. We con- 
cede it. Most of the enthusiastic people seem to 
prefer to follow the cheer leaders than to go into 
training. 

Consequently our team lacks enthusiasm and their 
teams lack training. 

Men want to get rich quickly and to get healed 
quickly and to get salvation quickly, and we are in 
the exact frame of mind to be humbugged quickly 
in all these enterprises. 


The blue sky is the only limit to their expectations, 
while most of those expectations land in the ceme- 
tery. 

Our religion in America lacks staying qualities. 
We want to ‘march to Zion, the blessed city of God,” 
on our enthusiasm. 

Consequently most of our players have to be taken 
out of the line long before the whistle blows. 

We hate the tedious monotony of adequate train- 
ing. 

Given in a loud voice, some glittering generalities, 


186 CUSHIONED PEWS 


the language of the street and a crowded tabernacle, 
and the devil is whipped already. 

As a matter of fact he is about as scared as a well 
trained varsity team would be scared by the noise 
and enthusiasm of an ill trained high school team. 

It is about time the American people learned that 
these methods are ineffective. 

The more instantaneous the method of making 
saints, the less effective is the nation in establishing 
righteousness. 


The more noisy the salvation, the less ethical the 
results. 


Not that noise is wicked nor that it is wholly in- 
effective, but that mere noise without training will 
never reach the goal. 

“Leaving those things that are behind let us press 
toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of 
God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

These cheer leaders have mixed up the goal and 
the prize most woefully. 

They want to seize the prize (salvation) without 
ever reaching the goal (which is the righteousness 
of Jesus Christ). . 

“Until we all come in the unity of the faith, and 
of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect 
man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness 
of Christ.” 

But the Church still invites us to go into training, 
to gradually learn what is the unity of faith and to 
slowly acquire the knowledge of the Son of God in 
order that if possible we may attain our goal. 


THE ADVENT CALL 187 


In order to make this training effective the Church 
has set forth a Church year in which we may ground 
ourselves in the knowledge of our faith. 

Let us approach these various seasons with this 
intention, that we shall learn the lesson of each 
season so that we may have a knowledge of the Son 
of God and that we will take out place on the team 
and do our stunt faithfully in order that we may 
practice the unity of the faith. 


Christmas Observance 


HE one factor which has leavened the 

: cruelty of a pagan world has been the life of 

Christ. 

I care not whether you go back to the ancient pag- 
anism of Egypt and Assyria; of Greece and Rome; 
or contemplate either Cathay or the Levant; or study 
the Reign of Terror in France or Russia, you are 
forced to conclude that the natural man is cruel and 
has little sympathy with suffering. 

Christ came into a drab and desolate world with 
His personal message of “Glory to God and Peace on 
Earth,” and wherever mankind has accepted Christ’s 
standards they have been transformed by His mar- 
velous personality. 

His severity toward human error caused Him to 
be crucified, but His love for human souls caused 
Him to be adored by those who loved righteousness 
and hated iniquity. 

It was the personal Jesus who touched the needs 
of men—so that in seeing Him they saw the Father. 

Men who could not define Him, loved Him pas- 
sionately. 

Now men who are incapable of loving Him define 
Him learnedly. 

They learned to love Him as their Savior, and so 
came to worship Him as God. 

The religion of the primitive Church was the pas- 
sionate love for the God-man, which was willing to 
make any sacrifice in the expression of that love. 


188 


CHRISTMAS OBSERVANCE 189 


We have substituted a definition of God for this 
personal motive. 

The love of Christ constrained them to deeds of 
service, whereas the love of self restrains us from 
much real sacrifice in His name. 

This is at no time more evident than at Christmas. 

Our Christian Christmas is about as pagan an 
institution as one could devise. 

We certainly accommodate God to circumstances 
at this season which is supposed to commemorate a 
person who died for us, and which we use to stimu- 
late trade and gratify society. 

How can a Christian pretend to keep Christmas 
and leave Christ out? 

And how else can we put Christ in unless we do 
the thing that He commanded us to do? 

The very name of Christmas involves Christ’s 
Mass, and even if we put the Lord’s Supper on the 
very lowest level of observance, it was the thing that 
He asked us to do in memory of Him, and when 
should one do a memorial act for one whom he rev- 
eres unless we do it on the day which marks His 
birth? 

To pretend to observe Christmas and to ignore 
Christ is to be guilty of a personal insult to His 
memory. 

What is Christmas in Christian America today ? 

Is it a memorial to Christ or is it merely an oppor- 
tunity to enjoy ourselves? Or worse still, to use 
Him for the loaves and fishes? 

There is no more room for Him in the inn today 
than there was in Bethlehem. 


190 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Christmas has become so secularized and diverted 
from its original purpose that people are too Mreos to 
meet Him at the Altar. 

Or we have so many social engagements planned 
and so many friends to entertain that we forget the 
Christ in our multitudinous activities. 

And we give our Christian gifts today not in His 
uname but in the name of some club or organized 
charity ‘that is in no way related to Him. 

It was His wish that the smallest gifts should be 
given to His name. 

Now “for fear of the Jews,’ we throw our Christ- 
mas offerings into a common fund from which His 
name has been studiously delected, and we sacrifice 
His memory to prudence. 

Christmas comes and we are either too tired to 
worship Christ or too busy to worship Christ or too 
timid to worship Christ. 

In short we are so worldly that we keep Christmas 
with Christ left out and we do it because we do not 
really believe in a personal living Christ at God’s 
right hand. 

If we really believed in a living Christ we could 
not be guilty of such a breach of good manners as to 
keep His birthday without Him any more than we 
would observe the President’s birthday (if he were 
the head of our family) without any personal recog- 
nition such as we might imagine he would appre- 
ciate. 

After all isn’t an impersonal God merely a crea- 
ture of our own imagination, made at home so that 
we can control his domination? 


CHRISTMAS OBSERVANCE 191 


We are indolent and do not wish to worship, so we 
manufacture a God who does not require it. 

We are self willed and do not wish to obey so we 
create a God who obeys us. 

We are selfish and do not wish to give, so we create 
a God who does not desire our liberality. 

A Christless Christmas is a travesty. 

It would seem incumbent for a Christian on Christ- 
mas Day to raise early. 

Let us go to Bethlehem and see this wondrous 
thing that has come to pass. 

We have more cause to rejoice than those poor 
shepherds who knew merely the Christ of prophecy, 
while we know the Christ of history—a Christ far 
more wonderful than even the Christ in Galilee for 
there He gave no other evidence of His power than 
His goodness and His good works, but we know Him 
as the power of righteousness for nineteen centuries. 

It is Christ who has overcome the world so that a 
man may be righteous without being crucified, and a 
man may have liberty without being tortured. 

Ingratitude is the worst of vices, and to be so un- 
grateful as not to keep the festal day of our Savior 
is to betray our ingratitude to Him. 

Surely the world needs nothing more than it needs 
a Christian Christmas—a Christmas in which Christ 
is With us in a real and personal way, and not merely 
as the one who stimulates trade and makes it possible 
for us to have a good time. 


Christmas Peace 


N HIS little book on “The Psychology of Insan- 
| ity,’ Dr. Hart relates an incident. A certain 

man complained bitterly that a certain peal of 
chimes was discordant and irritating. 

As a matter of fact, the chimes were in perfect 
tune and were particularly sweet. 

The man had a complex which perverted him so 
that he called good, evil, and harmony discord. 

Why was that? Because he disliked the clergy- 
man in whose church the chimes were hung; there- 
fore, he disliked the chimes. 

A little root of bitterness had so spread that it 
enveloped his whole being and everything was col- 
ored by this prejudice. 

So, you will find a large proportion of the human 
race infected with incipient madness. 

Their judgment is perverted by their complexes 
of human prejudice. You will find Republicans and 
Democrats alike who refuse to acknowledge that any 
one in the opposite party has any virtue. You will 
find financiers and laborers who have a similar com- 
plex. 

So, Protestant and Catholic are unable to see good 
in any act pertaining to the other faction. 

Such complexes are substitutes for reason and 
destitute of charity. 

Those who hold them frequently think that they - 
do so in the name of the Lord, but there is nothing 
to justify this assumption, 


192 


CHRISTMAS PEACE 193 


It was the Pharisee and not the Christ who was 
the victim of these complexes. 

It was the Pharisee who felt such contempt for 
the Samaritan, who was the heretic of his day. 


Christ saw whatever was good in the Samaritan 
without compromising his heresy. 

“Ye worship ye know not what,” was His declara- 
tion about the religion of the Samaritan, but in 
several instances He spoke approvingly of good 
Samaritans. 

To the Pharisee there were no good Samaritans. 
His complex would not admit it. 


To the Pharisee there were no good Dan 
Christ found some. 


To the Pharisee the woman of the town was hope- 
lessly outcast; Christ found some that He could for- 
give. 

In fact, it was such a complex that prevented the 
Pharisee from seeing any good in Christ. He wished 
to crucify Christ, not because Christ was evil, but 
because Christ ruthlessly violated all of his favorite 
complexes. 


The Pharisee lived on these complexes. They saved 
him the necessity of thinking about that which he 
disliked and of forgiving those whom he detested. 


Christ could make no impression on such natures. 
He only irritated them. They hated Him because He 
refused to be a party to their unreasonable preju- 
dices. 

The spirit of Christmas is the spirit of good will. 
It is hostile to inveterate prejudice. It breaks down 


194 CUSHIONED PEWS 


the barriers of caste and makes of one blood all na- 
tions, sects, cults, and complexes. 

To Scrooge, who had a money complex, it was not 
Merry Christmas but merry humbug. Any merri- 
ment that cost him money was incomprehensible to 
him because it cost money. 

To the bitter radical, Christmas is an irritation, 
because it rebukes hatred and condemns bitterness. 

To the one-compartment mind, Christmas is in- 
comprehensible because the spirit of Christmas can- 
not be reduced to a syllogism or confined to one idea. 

The world has taken kindly to Christmas for sev- 
eral reasons: Christmas helps trade, promotes jol- 
lity, is different from the rest of the year. 

But Christmas sentiment is very different from 
Christian principle, just as far as the sentiment pro- 
duced by an actor is from the sentiment produced by 
real poverty. 

It is luxurious to shed tears over a mythical orphan 
cn the stage, but dreadfully dull to help the real 
orphan in the alley. 

How often it is that the luxury costs much more © 
than the reality! 

So, Christmas as an incident in life is very differ- 
ent from a Christian spirit as the controlling prin- 
ciple of a lfe. 

How shall we observe Christmas? We will knock 
off work and give the day up to enjoyment. Fine. 
We will give expensive presents to our family who 
have much, and something to the poor who have little. 
Very good! We will have a good dinner and some 


CHRISTMAS PEACE 195 


merry games, and see that the children have a good 
time. Excellent! 

But yet, Christmas is Christ’s birthday — the day 
on which we should remember Him. 

How? By giving something to somebody in His 
name. Good! if we really give it in His name. 

But, lest we forget! He said, “Do this in remem- 
brance of me.” 

Surely we have not celebrated His festal day un- 
less we have given Him that which He most desires. 

And what does He most desire? That we shall give 
Him “ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reason- 
«ble, holy and living sacrifice.” 

It is not enough that we give Him things, or that. 
we give things to others; He wants us to give Him 
ourselves. And this does not mean merely that we 
think of Him, or sing about Him, or even listen to a 
sermon. It means that we lay ourselves on the altar 
of His sacrifice. It means that we join the offering 
of ourselves to His offering of Himself, and this we 
do when we present ourselves to Him in the service 
that He commanded us to observe. 

You may get something of the spirit of Christmas 
and leave Him out, but you cannot observe the day 
and forget Him. 

And what is involved in your Christmas Eucharist? 

Is it not that you are in love and cnarity with your 
neighbors? That whatever they have done or failed 
to do for you, that you put on Christ’s spirit of for- 
giveness. That you smash your complexes. That 
vou try to find the good in those whom you do not 
like and an excuse for those who have injured you. 


196 CUSHIONED PEWS 


That you put on the spirit of Christ, not for a holi- 
day season, but for all the year. That you clothe 
yourself in His spirit of “peace on earth and good 
will to men.” 

Hard! Of course it is hard. 

Whoever said that it was easy to get the mind of 
Christ? 

But is is important. I can assure you that it is 
most important for this mad world that we get rid 
of our complexes and put away our bitterness. It is 
important that we do not add to the chaos of human 
selfishness, but become a force for forgiveness in 
crder that we may experience forgiveness. 

I am sure that God never attempted to create any- 
thing as difficult as the Kingdom of Heaven. He can 
speak the word and things obey Him—but He speaks 
the word to men and they curse Him. 

He can so order things that they follow the im- 
mutable law which He gave them. 

But He asks men to love one another and they fill 
the whole world with the clamor of their complexes. 

It is true that there is a limit to God’s omnipo- 
tence, and that limit is that He cannot force men to — 
love Him or to forgive one another. 

Even when He so loved us that He gave His Son, 
we so loved ourselves that we slew His love. 

Greater love can no man show than to give his 
life, unless it be when a father or mother gives the 
life of a beloved son for a cause. 

God so loved us because there was no other way 
that we could learn to love Him. He gave us His best 
that it might bring out the best in us. And that best 


CHRISTMAS PEACE 197 


we find in opening the doors of our hearts that 
Christ may be born therein, and then opening those 
doors again that the Christ in us may go out into 
the world to do Christ’s work among men. 

You may find it hard to get rid of your bitterness, 
but you will never find it easier than it is now, and 
if you do not get rid of that bitterness you will find 
it exceeding hard to meet your Lord when He comes 
again. 

The world needs Christ, but clings to its bitter- 
ness, and so the world finds chaos. 

We cannot do much, each one of us, but we can add 
to the world’s peace by eliminating all bitterness 
from our own hearts, and this we can do only at the 
shrine of Jesus Christ. 


An Epiphany Thought 
VER one hundred years ago the Episcopal 
O Church began in a feeble way to organize its 
missionary forces. Her methods were slow 
and cumbersome when compared with the rough and 
ready way of the Methodist circuit rider and the 
Baptist preacher. 

Her leaders were timid and apathetic about the 

conversion of picneers to her ways. 


Her laity were indifferent to the call of the frontier 
and were well satisfied with establishing their own 
parishes in the older settlements. 

Her volunteers to undertake the task of planting 
the Church in the new West were few and ill-sup- 
ported. 

The skirmish line of light infantry thrown out by 
Methodists and Baptists occupied the ground while 
we were getting our heavy artillery in shape for 
action. 

Thanks to men like Bishop Griswold, Bishop — 
Hobart and Bishop Moore, the Church became 
established in the original States, but even these 
energetic men did not see how they could do that 
and add any effort to man the ever-growing frontier. 


There were few men like Philander Chase and 
Jackson Kemper, who wrestled with the problem of 
introducing the Church to the newer settlements. 
There were few men with the vision and the gener- 
osity to finance these pioneers — with the result that 


198 


AN EPIPHANY THOUGHT 199 


we lost our opportunity in the Mid-West to make the 
Church strong and vigorous. 

And the weakness of the Church in the Mid-West 
made the problem of the Church in the far West still 
more difficult than it would otherwise have been. 

The greatest comfort in the problem arises from 
the fact that each decade has marked a growing 
interest in missions, and a deeper realization that 
the spirit of missions is the life of the Church. 

When I was a young man no men took interest in 
missions, but rather prided themselves on their in- 
difference to the subject. A few women who loved 
the Church studied and prayed and did what they 
could. 

Today there is an increasing circle of men and 
women within the Church who realize these things. 

First: That the Church has an obligation to her 
divine Lord to carry out His command. 

Second: That the Church has a message which 
the world sorely needs and which the Church can 
best supply. 

Third: That the work of missions does more to 
enlarge the vision of the giver than any other instru- 
ment of service. 

Let us meditate upon these three considerations: 

First: That the Church has an obligation to the 
Master. 

I fear that many Christians do not worship the 
living God, but rather serve a definition of God. 

It was in many respects a blessing that the early 
Christians loved Christ rather than defined Him. 

It would be lovely if we could still do this, but 


200 CUSHIONED PEWS 


when the enemies of Christ began to say what He 
was not, the Church was forced to come out and say 
what He was, and so Christ became the subject of 
definition. 

It is a very different thing for a man to accept the 
hypostatiec union as a tenet of theology and to accept 
Christ as the Master of his life. 

Each may be necessary but the one in no way takes 
the place of the other. 

The accurate theologian is not a synonym for the 
faithful servant. 

As soon as Christ becomes a living Master en- 
throned in Heaven, then His commands become 
superior to our theories: It is no longer a question 
as to whether I believe in missions, but it has become 
the question as tec whether my Master commands me 
to go. 

The soldier must not brood over the unpleasant- 
ness of his orders but he must, rather, ascertain the 
character of them. 

Christ’s command to go into all the world and 
preach the gospel to every creature, indicates His 
will and it is our business as Christians to do His 
will. 

I believe in missions because I am fully persuaded 
that my Master commands me so to do. 

Second: The Church has a message which the 
world needs. 

It is as much a matter of our concern as to whe- 
ther our standards of righteousness are correct as 
it is whether our individual performance is exem- 
plary. I do not know that a good Mohammedan is 


AN EPIPHANY THOUGHT 201 


more or less desirable than a poor Christian, just as 
I do not believe a good performer of jazz music is 
a better musician than a poor renderer of classical 
music. The performance of the one is placed against 
the ideals of the other. 

The world is undergoing a disintegrating process 
because of three things which it lacks — 

(a) Reverence for God and authority. 

(b) Poise and sanity in religious expression. 

(c) None of Christ’s sympathy for the sinner. 

Third: That the work of missions enlarges the 
soul of the giver. 

Selfishness is the devastating scourge of human 
life. 

To obviate selfishness we need to do something for 
which we received no personal return. It is this 
which adheres to whatever we give to the local parish 
or in the community. 

In giving ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a 
living, holy, and reasonable offering, we should give 
what Christ wishes of us — not that which will most 
profit us. 

It is this aspect of giving and doing for missions 
that has the right reaction on the giver. 

We sing: “More love to Thee O Christ,” then let 
us do what we sing. Let us do that which the Lord 
hath commanded us to do because we love Him. 

It is so hard to get people to see this, just as it is 
hard to get people to give a present which the recip- 
ient will enjoy, even though the giver cares not for it. 

As Christ says, “If ye love Me, ye will keep My 
commandments.” 


202 CUSHIONED PEWS 


It is just that. It is Christ’s commandment that 
we assist Him in carrying the gospel to every 
creature. . 

It is an act of personal service to Him that we do 
this, all the more if we do it because we love Him —- 
not because we understand why He wishes us to 
make this sacrifice. 

The cross of Christ is the great missionary gift. 

He gave all for all men because He loved all. 

He asks us to give something for all men because 
we love Him, and we love Him because He first loved 
us. 

The cross was a gift to all, which few appreciate 
and which was wasted on many, but Christ is the 
lovable person He is, just because He gave, counting 
not the cost nor our appreciation of the cost. He 
gave simply because He loved — He asks us to do the 
same, and there is no place in which we can give as 
He gave to us, so readily as in Missions. Thanks be 
to God for His inestimable gift and thanks be to God 
for an adequate appreciation thereof. 


Lenten Training 


OD ees word means “spring,” and spring sug- 
| gests work. 

But it suggests work that is profitable and 
for which there is a harvest in which we will reap 
that which we sow. 

Lent is a season in which we are to break up the 
hard soil by penitence, and so let the Word of God 
be sown in our hearts that our lives may be fruitful. 

And the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy and peace. 

Just now the world is reaping its harvest of self- 
ishness, hate and recklessness, and if experience is 
worth anything, men should have learned that we 
cannot have love, joy and peace unless we are willing 
to undergo the discipline of the Christian life. For 
there is no harder or more stubborn soil than these 
hearts of ours, and they will never bring forth good 
fruit unless we are willing to till the ground. 

Let us then tend to our spring planting and ask 
ourselves what we must do. 

And first we must break up the soil. ‘Repent’ 
comes first in spiritual gardening. What is repen- 
tance? What is conversion? What is it to be poor 
in spirit? 

The Greek word for repentance means to change 
your mind. 

Not once, but frequently. St. Peter had to repent 
several times. He repented whenever his assurance 
made him feel that he was self-sufficient. So many 
people have one spasm of repentance, after which 


203 


204 CUSHIONED PEWS 


they settle down to a life of inflexible prejudices. 
There ig just one springtime in their religion and 
after that hardness of heart and lack of sympathy. 

Repentance is a daily need, but especially in the 
springtime of our Church year, when we need to — 
discover our hardness and do violence to it. 

Jesus Christ loved publicans and sinners in spite 
of their faults; but a religion which repents but 
once is so hard toward sinners that, having been 
themselves forgiven, they forgive none who differ 
from them. We need to break up the heart and 
mind by penitence whenever it begins to harden. 

A purely emotional religion lacks the sympathetic 
note after it has become assured that its own soul has 
been saved. 

Conversion is to turn around. Every time we find 
that we have our back towards God’s will, we are to 
be converted and turn to God. 

To be poor in spirit is to realize the poverty of 
our own resources and the inexhaustible resources 
of the true riches which Christ bestows only on the 
humble and the meek. | 

Those who fancy that they are rich, He sends 
empty away. 

Next we must sow the seed. 

And the word seed means something that men 
cannot manufacture. All the wisdom of this world 
cannot fashion one grain of wheat. 

Mr. Burbank may take the potato and make it 
larger, more edible, more profitable,. but Mr. Bur- 
bank cannot make a potato out of the elements of 
the earth. “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, 


LENTEN TRAINING 205 


and the giver of life’’ and I believe that ‘“‘the seed is 
the word of God.” 

Now it is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that 
He sows the seed of eternal life in our souls. 

What is the word of God? 

It is not only that the New Testament contains 
the word of God, but the ambassadors of Christ were 
entrusted with that word. 

When a minister of Christ baptizes a child, he 
uses the word of Jesus Christ, and that word is the 
same by which all things were made. 

Christ gave His Church not merely the written 
word, but He gave the spoken word to His ministers. 
Whoever uses the word of Christ to baptize a child 
acts as the agent of Christ and therefore conveys to 
the child the power of His word. 

So when a priest of the Church celebrates the 
Lord’s Supper, he does not use his own language, but 
the very words that Christ used in the institution of 
that sacrament. 

This also is the word of God. 

So also when one sent by the Master pronounces 
the words of absolution over a penitent sinner he is 
merely carrying out the word of Christ, who both 
torgave sin Himself and distinctly commanded His 
representatives that they should bind and loose the 
sins of men. 

“Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted and 
whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained.’ 

So when men are ordained, they are sent forth 
with the very words of Christ. 

Lastly, we must cultivate the life that He gives us. 


206 CUSHIONED PEWS 


Weeds grow without man’s effort, but grain brings 
forth fruit only as man labors. 

Soil that is neglected is far worse than virgin soil. 

When men neglected the soil once broken, then 
came weeds which were of value to neither man nor 
beast. 

The sins of civilization are the sins of neglected 
opportunities. They are far worse than the sins of 
the savage. 

Now the work of the husbandman is not exciting, 
but it is most important. So the means of grace 
which Christ has provided for the cultivation of 
spiritual fruits are not attained by hectic efforts, but 
rather by steady industry. 

I wish that Christian people would learn that 
Christ is more -concerned with the little virtues of 
life than with its heroics. 

He who talked of the woman sweeping out her 
home and the man tending his sheep was more con- 
cerned with the faithfulness of everyday acts than 
He was of the unusual dramatics in life. 

It isn’t so much that we need always to be rescuing 
the perishing from horrible damnation as it is that 
we are to let our light shine steadily, brightly, per- 
sistently. 

If the Church could only produce men and women 
who were constant in prayer; who were quick to for- 
give; who were loathe to wound others; who were 
kindly interested in others, neither talking cant nor 
cultivating a stony stare; who felt that every one in 
God’s house was a member of God’s family entitled 
to decent courtesy; who gave their share to support 


LENTEN TRAINING 207 


the Church; who did some one thing for Christ and 
did it faithfully; who confessed their own sins regu- 
larly, not the sins of others; who refused to mani- 
fest bitterness toward personal injury or neglect; 
who were instant in season and out of season, not 
with excuses but service; then indeed would the 
Church be doing the will of her divine Master, and 
the lives of Christians would preach louder and bet- 
ter than the most eloquent preachers; and the cause 
of Christ would not need apology, but would com- 
mand respect. 

Worldly people are dull enough, but worldly Chris- 
tions are not only dull, but vicious. 

Then let us use Lent as a period of training in 
which we strive to sow the seed which Christ gives 
us, and carefully to cultivate the soil for which we 
are responsible. We know that we will never regret 
it; we are merely too inert to secure the blessing. 

Let us not foolishly think that we are some extra- 
ordinary soil that produces crops without travail. 

There is no alibi for service. You either do it or 
you don’t. 

You are either a faithful. husbandman or a lazy, 
shiftless farmer. 

Why delude yourself with the idea that you are a 
special exception to God’s universal law? 


A Lenten Duty 


ENT starts with Ash Wednesday and termi- 
nates in Good Friday and Easter. It begins 

with our confession of sin, and ends in the 
penalty of sin and the victory which may emerge 
from suffering. 

It teaches us that the wages of sin is death and 
that the gift of God is eternal life. 

Lent, therefore, is a period of approach to the 
Risen Christ through His sufferings and death, and 
we are told by Him that there is no other way, and 
only as we take up our cross and follow Him, can 
we hope for the goal that He reached. 

It is the story of man’s pilgrimage through the 
valley of death to the Mount of the Ascension that 
lies beyond. 

The journey starts in a descent. We go down from 
the smug level of our self-assurance and self-esteem. 

We humbly remind God that He hates nothing that 
He has made. We ask Him to forgive those who are 
penitent. | ? 

We pray that He may put into us contrite hearts 
to lament our sin and to acknowledge our wretched- 
ness. We hope to obtain perfect remission and for- 
giveness. 

And we sum it all up in the name of Jesus Christ, 
our Lord. 

There is no recognition here of that cultural pro- 
cess by which we save our own face and approach 
God with perfect composure. 


208 


A LENTEN DUTY 209 


Instead there is a confusion of face as our sins 
come up before us. We are miserable sinners; we are 
unprofitable servants; we are disobedient children. 


Many regard this approach to God as unreal and 
unnatural. “I have never done anything so very 
bad,” says one; “why should I call myself a miserable 
sinner ?” 

For the same reason that you would call yourself 
a daubster, if you were to begin the study of art 
under a great artist; or, that you would hate to per- 
form on the piano before a great master of music. 


Unless you approach the mastery of any art with 
a consciousness of your limitations, you will never 
acquire very much mastery of the art. 


If you press toward the measure of the stature of 
the fullness of Christ as the goal of your life, you 
would be woefully unreal if you did not feel your 
own unworthiness. | 

For the character of Christ did not consist merely 
in the absence of wicked things; it consisted essen- 
tially in the daily sacrifices and continual services 
rendered to God and man; it consisted also in the 
absence of bitterness and the refusal to take revenge 
against those who constantly maligned Him; it con- 
sisted also in His comprehensive mission in which 
He bore the iniquities of us all. 

It is not merely because Christ kept the ten com- 
mandments that He convinces us of sin: it is because 
Christ entered fully into the needs of human life; the 
cry of human misery; the victims of human injustice 
and gave Himself for them, that causes us to realize 


210 CUSHIONED PEWS 


that, when we have done all, we are unprofitable 
servants. 

The beauty of holiness is only possible to the sin- 
ner who has learned to loathe the ugliness of a selfish 
life. So long as we are complacent in our own petti- 
ness, we may never hope to grow into the measure 
of His stature. 

The first step in acquiring wealth is the conscious- 
ness of poverty, and that is why poor boys are so 
much more apt to be money-makers than the sons of 
the wealthy. 

The beginning of knowledge is the appreciation of 
cur ignorance, and the man who thinks he is always 
right is hopeless as a student. 

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand” 
is an announcement in which only those who are con- 
scious of their own unworthiness will ever see the 
need of putting on the righteousness of Christ. 

This is the forerunner of the Gospel as announced 
by the Virgin Mother. ‘‘He hath put down the mighty 
from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and the 
meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, ~ 
and the rich He hath sent empty away.” 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ was foolishness to the 
Greeks, just because the Greek was so sure of his 
culture that he needed no Saviour. 

It was of such that Jesus said, “They that are 
whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. 
I came not to eall the righteous but sinners to re- 
pentance.” The greatest bar to the development of 
Christly character in America today is the assurance 
generally held by Americans that they are good 


A LENTEN DUTY 211 


enough to satisfy their own requirements and that 
their sins are not so hateful to God as the sins of 
others, so why should they repent? If the experi- 
ences and utterances of Christ have any force, he, 
who thinks in this way, is the very one whom Christ 
warns constantly. 

One cannot grow in grace unless one is so per- 
suaded of his need of grace that he asks God fer- 
vently and frequently for the same. 

In the Gospel for Ash Wednesday we are reminded 
ef this same truth from another standpoint. 

Christ presents it to us under the analogy of treas- 
ure, bidding us to lay up for ourselves treasure in 
Heaven, for “Where our treasure is, there will our 
heart be also.” 

There is very little need of urging people to lay 
up treasure on earth. They can see the value of 
earthly treasure. One needs imagination, however, 
to see the value of a great painting. An ignorant 
yokel sees nothing in it but something to destroy — © 
or to sell if anyone can be found foolish enough to 
buy it. 

It is the same with spiritual treasure. One needs 
understanding to appreciate it. As a people we lack 
spiritual imagination. A friend of mine was riding 
with a farmer early one June morning, and as they 
drove out of the woods they came upon a bluff over- 
looking a beautiful lake, which the rising sun bathed 
in crimson splendor. 

“What a beautiful lake,’ he enthusiastically re- 
marked. “Oh, I don’t know,” said the farmer, “it is 
just a lake.” 


212 CUSHIONED PEWS 


So the scientific critic looks at the four gospels. 
To him they are just a biography. 

To the business man the elements in the Holy 
Eucharist are just bread and wine. 

To the society woman, that poor girl who comes 
to her door is just a beggar. To the self-satisfied 
man of affairs Jesus Christ is just a man. 

A stupidly mechanical world, set in its standard- 
ized conventions, fails to appreciate that there are 
treasures of holiness, which, when appreciated, cause 
cne to fall upon his knees and exclaim, “God be 
merciful to me a sinner!!” 

And cause the sinner to long for the time that by 
the grace of God, even a poor sinner might be like 
Him. ‘Where our treasure is, there our heart will 
be also.” 

And if our treasure lies in things, our heart will 
long for things and be satisfied with the petty dis- 
tinction that things can produce in the human heart. 

But if,our treasure is in Christ, then our heart 
will never be satisfied until it has given itself entirely 
to Christ, conscious of its own unworthiness, but 
conscious also that His grace is sufficient for us. 

We can approach the holiness of God without arro- 
gance, only as we are conscious of the sins that keep 
us from knowing Him as He is revealed to us in the 
person of Jesus Christ. 

The self-seeking person who thinks to cultivate 
the majesty of God by assuming his own importance, 
will find himself guilty only of colossal impertinence. 

God is a person who is tenderly compassionate 
toward penitent sinners, but who declines to be the 


A LENTEN DUTY 213 


subject of patronage on the part of his creatures, no 
matter how important those creatures may fancy 
themselves to be. 

The best educated men are those who are most 
conscious of the limited character of their education 
and the saintliest of men have ever been those who 
were most profoundly conscious of their own short- 
comings. 

We may approach God only as we acknowledge 
our own weakness in the presence of His glory. 


Easter Even 


N EASTER Even we are standing between 
C) the greatest tragedy of human history and 

the greatest hope of human life, between 
Good Friday and Easter Day. 

The questions arise in our mind at once why was 
the one necessary ? How can the other be true? 

Of course we would rejoice to rise from the dead 
if it didn’t seem so impossible! But how can we hope 
for such beatitude when we are surrounded by such 
injustice? — 

These two great mysteries — 

The mystery of darkness, 

The mystery of life, 3 
meet in the twilight of Easter Even when the body 
of Jesus is lying still, wrapped in the clothing of the 
dead and, we are told, His spirit is in the place of 
departed spirits, telling them that the doors of their 
prison shall be opened. 

It all reads like a fairy tale to those who believe 
that the material world is the only substantial fact. 
in life and who think that a belief in the supernat- 
ural is a foolish superstition which should not engage 
the serious attention of those who walk by sight and 
not by faith. 

Of course it all depends upon our viewpoint. 

If in looking at life we find that it is merely a 
process which is solely dependent upon physical sight 
and logical conclusions, then surely nothing can be 
required of us but physical exercise and mental gym- 


214 


EASTER EVEN 215 


nastics, but if the life of Jesus Christ reveals to us 
a more excellent way, then surely it is not to be 
explained by these processes. 

And first of all, back of Good Friday and Easter 
lies the life of Jesus. It was in no sense an ordinary 
life. 

Indeed, it was so extraordinary that though it has 
had many imitators, no one has ever even approxi- 
mated it in the peculiar character of its power. 

Whatever opinion we may have of His faith and 
nature, we cannot dispute the fact that He has ex- 
erted an influence by methods which are so deeply 
hidden from human wisdom that His most devoted 
disciples acknowledge their inability to copy them. 

The influence of Jesus is totally unlike the influ- 
ence of any other mortal who ever lived, both in the 
intensity of its power and the scope of its activity. 

The unobtrusive methods by which He attained 
this influence are utterly unlike the influences by 
which other leaders have gained power over men. 

And the influence which He has exerted over men 
is a different kind of influence than that which other 
men have exerted, for time has not diminished its 
intensity ; distance is no bar to its efficacy; and dif- 
ferences in race and culture have not prevented men 
from learning the same lessons and experiencing the 
same grace from a personal relationship which they 
believe that they have. with Him. 

This personal power of Jesus is something which 
cannot be accounted for by materialists or philoso- 
phers. It is unique. 

It is not strange, therefore, that churchmen adhere 


216 CUSHIONED PEWS 


to the only testimony which they have and the only 
explanation which explains it at ail when they re- 
affirm their belief that ‘““He was conceived by the 
Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary ... was 
crucified, dead and buried, rose again from the dead, 
ascended into Heaven and from there sends the Holy 
Spirit to pervade and inspire the Church which in 
its miraculous continuity is also unique among all 
the organizations of mankind. 

If the life of Jesus is unique, His treatment of the 
mystery of evil is also peculiar to Himself. He alone 
originated this view. The religions of mankind have 
been hopelessly divided in their attitude toward the 
explanation of sin, suffering and death. 

In the Orient, matter was unreal, sts to non- 
existent, death a delusion. 

Among the Greeks, matter was the essential ele- 
ment, suffering to be avoided, death the end of all 
thing's. 

Jesus differed from every philosophy which pre- 
ceded His Gosped and from most of the theories that 
have succeeded it. 

To Him matter is equally sacred with aptre So 
much so that the “Word was made flesh and dwelt 
among us.” 

Suffering was not to be sought; He prayed to be 
delivered from it, but when it comes, it is to be 
endured, not stoically but humbly, with the assur- 
ance that God’s goodness will overcome the diabolical 
nature of evil. 

“It must needs be that offenses come,” said Jesus. 

Why? He does not explain, but states the fact. 


HASTER EVEN 217 


“But woe to that man by whom the offense 
cometh !”’ 

In other words, the evils in life are realities and 
the calm endurance of them is a necessity. 

The thing that must not happen is connivance 
with them. 

To Him death is such a grim reality that He 
shrinks from it more than the ordinary man, but 
while it is the last enemy of man, it can be overcome 
and so He commends His spirit into His father’s 
hands as one who confidently expects that God will 
overcome it. 

And the curious thing is that where men accept 
this view of things sincerely, there are love, joy and 
peace. 

And the power of Jesus extends further than this. 

Not only did He promise to His disciples that He 
would see them again, but He convinced them that 
He did see them after His resurrection. 

If He were merely a conjurer, depending upon 
hypnotic influence, He was indeed confident of this 
power if it could survive a public execution, and also 
succeed in transforming those who confessed that 
they had been cowards into those who gloried in 
their confidence that death could not permanently 
harm them. 

The public execution of Jesus is as well attested 
as other well-known facts of history. 

At least the story of the Crucifixion could not be 
the result of mesmeric influence. 

And between the influence of Jesus as a leader and 
the influence of Jesus as one who had risen from the 


218 CUSHIONED PEWS 


dead, stands the cross, not only with its indubitable 
account of His death, but also with the attendant 
discouragement of His disciples. 

Not only did they believe in the fact of His death 
they also failed to believe in His power to rise from 
the death. | 

There was no predisposition to the suggestion of 
the risen Christ, if we are to believe in any degree 
the sincerity of His witnesses. They fully believed 
that their cause was lost. 

They were bewildered and dismayed by their own 
confession. 

Suddenly they were inspired with a great hope— 
so great that nothing afterward could ever destroy 
the persistence of their faith. 

It is all so unusual that I must be pardoned if I 
regard the so-called scientific explanations of these 
phenomena as mere rationalization; that is, the at- 
tempt to start with a conclusion that isn’t conclusive 
and lead up with a set of premises that would be 
incredible to a purely pagan audience. 

I can believe whole-heartedly in a supernatural 
religion which explains things beyond my ken, if I 
believe in the credibility of its testimony; but I can- 
not believe in a supernatural religion which is bol- 
stered up merely by explanations that do not explain, 
but only bewilder. I believe in the Christ who said 
to Thomas: “Reach hither thy hands, and be not 
faithless but believing.” But I cannot believe in a 
Christ who could fool Thomas into thinking that he 
was touching something that was not there; nor 
could I believe in any testimony of a set of witnesses 


EASTER EVEN 219 


who would deliberately concoct a story to bolster a 
theory. 

Kither the Christ as He is or no Christ will be the 
Saviour of the world tomorrow as He has been the 
Saviour of mankind for centuries. 


Easter Fashions 


HE WORLD loses its interest in Christ after 

Easter. Having commercialized the season 

of His Birth and the season of His Resurrec- 

tion, it becomes singularly indifferent to His Ascen- 
sion. 

The Christmas trade and the Easter parade are 
perfectly harmless if they are accompanied by our 
real devotion to the author of these seasons. 

It is meet that we should make gifts and clothe 
ourselves in bright raiment, if there is still room in 
our heart for Him. 

But as a substitute for righteousness, clothes and 
social customs are poor stuff. 

We can dress most carefully and correctly while 
we have a heart of a snob and the mind of a moron. 
Beneath social convention we may find little brains 
and less virtues; whereas the season of Easter re- 
minds us that we must have a hunger for righteous- 
ness, and a capacity for friendship, and the love of 
worship. | 

The age is so concerned with the mechanics of 
existence that it has forgotten the joy of the sail. 

The age is more concerned as to the style in which 
a Christian is clothed, than it is with the quality of 
the soul which the clothes may cover. 

And the sad thing is that so many so-called Chris- 
tians put the world’s standard first and Christ’s 
standard next, oblivious of the fact that whatever 
they may think, He will not have it that way, but 


220 


EASTER FASHIONS 221 


will see that the last shall be first and the first, last. 

There is far more danger today of worldly fashion 
submerging the spiritual ideals of Christian folk, 
than there is hope that the advocates of Christ’s 
gospel will carry His message into the world. 

The man in the Church, who is honest, capable and 
obliging, is often passed by and preferment given to 
some shallow self-seeker who employs a good tailor 
and cultivates the right kind of people. 

It would be humorous, if it were not tragic. It 
is so difficult to fancy that the Man of Nazareth, 
whom we call Master, is so interested in current 
styles as some of His prominent disciples would 
make us believe. | 

Not that one should willfully violate the rules of 
good society. Truly they have a tendency to cover 
up the beast within us, but, judging from court re- 
ports and press notices, a large percentage of well 
dressed people, who do the correct thing, are little 
better than beasts. So that in such cases, whatever 
man there is has been tailor-made. 

It isn’t that one would suppress social custom; it 
is that one would hope that Christian men and wo- 
men would have sufficient moral strength to keep 
social customs from submerging the moral sense and 
spiritual discernment of Christians. It is a sad com- 
mentary on the time that when fathers and mothers 
are called upon to choose between social demands 
and Christian ideals, that the ideals so often go, and 
the poor little fish who are caught in the net of popu- 
jar demand, never do get a chance to grow any 
bigger. 


222 CUSHIONED PEWS 


It is just this point! When are we going to de- 
velop enough cultivated Christians who are civilized 
enough to realize that the service of Christ must 


come first in their lives, and that the world cannot - 


command in the domain of Christian influence. 

In other words, we have a right to expect that 
Christian men and women should be strong enough 
to put on the garb of social conventions, without los- 
ing the soul of a Christian. 

Some of the most awful catastrophies in history 
have been caused by the shallow selfisnness of sociai 
leaders, having a Christian veneer. This was the 
case in the court of Louis in France and of Nicholas 
in Russia, where the elegant manners of the elite 
were submerged by the brutal anger of the prole- 
tariat. : 

Either God is not in Heaven, or else He declines 
to be patronized by the smart set. 

Unless the word “gentleman” can be made to 
represent something deeper than mere ritual, it grad- 
ually becomes a thing so hateful to God and man, 
that the former will not use His power to save it 
from the vengeance of the latter. 

There is an omnious blot in American life today. 

It is a little cloud but one which may bring on the 
deluge. It is the present epidemic of silly Chris- 
tians. Society has kept the ritual of the social era, 
but is contemptuous of the Christian order. 

Now this may seem a small thing but small things 
sometimes indicate vicious diseases. 

Somebody has called attention to the passing of 
romanticism, which means nothing more or less than 


HASTER FASHIONS 223 


that men are losing the power of the imagination. 
It is evident all about us. The quality of poetry, 
popular music, art and architecture indicate an im- 
poverished imagination, a degenerate idealism. The 
American people need the Church Year, not because 
it needs to keep Sabbaths but because it needs to 
Jearn the value of proportion. 

Christmas, Lent, Eastertide are not mere names. 

They symbolize spiritual values. We need the 
season in which we hear the carols telling us, of 
“peace on earth good will to men” and “glory to God 
in the Highest.” 

We need the season of Lent, not as a fad which 
we patronize, but as a rule which we keep, to give 
us the perspective that comes from meditation and 
prayer. 

We need the Great Forty Days from Easter to 
Ascension, in order that we may visualize that if we 
be truly risen in Christ we must seek those things 
that are above. 

We need the Season of Whitsuntide to remind us 
that “as we are saved by grace and that not of our- 
selves, it is the gift of God.” And we need the Sea- 
son of Advent, that we may “watch and pray lest 
we enter into temptation.” When we have done all 
this, we have plenty of time left to take our place 
in the social order. 

It is not that the age is wicked so much as that 
its leaders are hopelessly stupid—we seem to divide 
into groups who feed on the pious vituperation of 
frenzied evangelists without graciousness; and those 
who feed on the silly alterations of dress and the 


224 CUSHIONED PEWS 


shallow sound of social gaiety. And all the time, 
Christ and the Church are asking us to keep the 


true proportions of life. 
“If ye be risen with Christ, seek those thas that 


are above.” 


The Great Forty Days 


HE period between Easter and Ascension 

Day is known as “The Great Forty Days in 

which Jesus taught his Apostles the things 
pertaining to the Kingdom of Heaven.” What these 
things are, are known only in part, because the rec- 
ord of His teaching during this period in very 
meager. 

What there is, seems to indicate that He was plan- 
ning for the future organization of the Church. 

The longest record of any definite teaching during 
these forty days is that recorded in the twentieth 
chapter of St. John. 

They were assembled in an upper room for fear 
of the Jews and no doubt bewildered by the turn 
things had taken since the resurrection of Jesus. 

He had appeared to St. Peter and St. John and 
to Mary in the garden, but there had been no definite 
conference with Jesus as to the future. 

So into this bewildered group of Apostles, Jesus 
suddenly came and said unto them, ‘Peace be unto 
you.”’ And when He had so said He showed them 
His hands and His sides. 

Then were the disciples glad when they saw the 
Lord. 

Then said Jesus unto them again, “Peace be unto 
vou: as My Father hath sent me even so send I you.” 
And when He had said this He breathed on them, 
and said unto them, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost. 
Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto 


225 


226 CUSHIONED PEWS 


them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are re- 
lained.” 

This statement must have been as startling to that - 
little group of bewildered and discouraged disciples 
as was His sudden appearance. 

What did it mean? What does it mean? 

A good many people are so bewildered by it that 
they just skip over it and attach no particular signi- 
ficance to it. 

But significant it was and vitally important it 
must have been. 

He certainly was not bestowing upon them a per- 
sonal power which they were to exercise as indi- 
viduals. The thought is too palpably absurd. 

There are two kinds of Doves bestowed upon men 
in the Gospels. 

The one is called “dynamic” in the Greek and 
means the power possessed by a person who has par- 
ticular talent that is his personal possession. A 
prophet might be said to be “dynamic.” 

The other was a derived power given to one who 
exercised some official power. This was called in 
the Greek—‘“exousia.” Such is the power pos- 
sessed by a sheriff in the state or by a priest in the 
Church. 

It is evident that Christ was here bestowing a de- 
rived power upon those whom He had appointed as 
officers in His Kingdom. 

““As My Father sent me, even so send I you,” could 
mean nothing else than this “exousia.” 

So we are here admitted into a glimpse of what 
was going on when our Lord was teaching them the 


THE GREAT FORTY DAYS 227 


things pertaining to the Kingdom of God, while they 
were with Him during those forty days. 

What then does it mean? 

The Creed of Christendom has been very specific 
in stating the purpose of the Holy Catholic Church. 

We believe in the Holy Catholic Church, in which 
we hope to receive the forgiveness of sins, the resur- 
vection of the body and the life everlasting. 

I do not know how we could ever hope to receive 
these blessings unless God gave them to us through 
Christ, and so far as the forgiveness of sins is con- 
cerned, He encountered the anger of the Pharisees 
by claiming this power. 

His Father had sent Him to take away the sins 
of the world and He on this occasion was sending 
His apostles to do the same thing that He had been 
sent to do. 

In other words, that is what the Church was in- 
tended to be in the world. It was to be a place to 
which the sinner might go in order to receive the 
remission of sins. 

The only trouble with this view of the Church is 
that it is too good to be true. 

Of course those who are not conscious of Berne 
sinners themselves, and who are particularly cen- 
sorious toward others who commit many actual 
transgressions, are firmly convinced that the way of 
are transpressor is hard and that their forgiveness is 
unfair. 

This was exactly the attitude of the elder brother 
in the parable and I am very much afraid that it is 
apt to be the attitude of all those highly respectable 


228 CUSHIONED PEWS 


folks who justify themselves that they are righteous 
and despise others who are not. 

This was one of the greatest obstacles which Jesus 
encountered. Because He ate and drank with pub- 
licans and sinners, the Pharisees murmured against 
Him, and in the same way those who are pretty sure 
of the rectitude of their own conduct are very jeal- 
ous of prodigals and any favor which may be shown 
them. 

Yet, if the Church is to be that which her Divine 
Master was to the world, then she must not scold 
prodigals but be ready to forgive them. In the words 
of the Master, “They that are whole need not a phy- 
sician but they that are sick” and since ye say ye © 
know, therefore your sin remaineth. 

Up to the time of the Reformation there can be no 
question that this conception of the Church was uni- 
yversally held. 

However badly the Church may have aduainintepel 
the grace of absolution, there was no question in the 
minds of all the faithful that she posse this 
power. 

The Church was the one institution in the world 
that was ever merciful to sinners and prodigals and 
lepers and outcasts. 

The conditions are the same; there are the elect 
and the outcasts, now as then. The elect look at the 
Church from a cultural standpoint. They have ar- 
rival at a certain stage of spiritual culture and they 
would like to progress further. 

Like the elder brother in the parable, they have 
little use for those who have wasted their substance 


THE GREAT FORTY DAYS 299 


with harlots. They want to enjoy the estate of 
Christ's Church. 

But Christ is still thinking more of the one sheep 
that is lost than He is of the ninety and nine who 
need no repentance or think that they do not. 

And it is just here that the Church must confess 
its greatest failure. 

It does not appeal very strongly to those who have 
gone out into a far country. The Church today isn’t 
winsome to sinners as He was. 

And the reason I fear is that we make too light of 
~ what our Lord said when He gave this commission 
to His apostles—and of what the Church says when 
she ordains us to the priesthood; for the Church is 
faithful to her trust even if her members are in- 
capable of living up to that standard. 

The pity of it is that priests who have been com- 
missioned with these words, often make light of their 
significance. 

- I am not advocating here the system of the con- 
fessional as the only way in which this mission of our 
Lord’s can be carried out. 

The Church existed many centuries without that 
penitential system by which the reception of the 
Holy Communion must be preceded by auricular con- 
fession. 

To me that is one method by which the Church met 
a tremendous emergency, when she was swamped by 
the semi-barbarian converts in the days of Charle- 
magne, and it remains a permissible method of deal- 
ing with sinners today. 

But for good and excellent reasons the Anglican 


230 -_ CUSHIONED PEWS 


Church refused to enforce this penitential system 
and left it voluntary with the sinner, nor would i 
recommend its restoration as practiced before the 
Reformation, and as practiced by the Roman Church 
today. It has its advantages, especially in the case 
of those whose sins are grievous and who cannot 
satisfy their own conscience, but it also has its dis- 
advantages as a mechanical system and these disad- 
vantages are grievous. 

But this is not the question which I am discussing. 

The primitive Church made much of the faet that 
“God hath given power and commandment to His 
ministers to declare and pronounce to His people, 
being penitent, the absolution and remission of their 
sins.” 

We also perpetuate the principle in the words that 
I have quoted, which we read sonorously every Sun- 
day. 

The Church is a hostel to which sinners are in- 
vited by our words but repelled by our failure to 
make these words seem real. 

It is the mission of the Church to forgive sins— 
it is the mission of the priest to seek out the sinful — 
that they may be forgiven. It is the mission of 
every Churchman to be a vehicle of pardon to the 
sinner with whom he comes in contact. 








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